York is best known as the first actor to play Darrin Stephens in the 1960s situation comedy Bewitched. The show was a huge success and York was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1968. Because of his back injury, which sometimes caused him to seize up in debilitating pain in later years, the scripts for some of his final episodes on Bewitched were written around his being in bed or on the couch for the entire episode. One day, during the fifth season of the sitcom: "I was too sick to go on. I had a temperature of one hundred and five, full of strong antibiotics, for almost ten days. I went to work that day but I was sick. I lay in my dressing room after being in make-up, waiting to be called on the set. They knew I was feeling pretty rotten, and they tried to give me time to rest. I kept having chills. This was the middle of the summer and I was wearing a sheepskin jacket and I was chilling. I was shaking all over. Then, while sitting on a scaffolding with Maurice Evans, being lit for a special effects scene: They were setting an inky - that's a little tiny spot that was supposed to be just flickering over my eyes. That flickering, flickering flickering made me feel weird. And I'm sitting on this platform up in the air...and I turned to Gibby, who was just down below, and I said, "Gibby, I think I have to get down." He started to help me down and that's the last thing I remember until I woke up on the floor. That's about all I remember of the incident...and I'd managed to bite a very large hole in the side of my tongue before they could pry my teeth apart."
From York's hospital bed, he and director Bill Asher discussed York's future. "Do you want to quit?", Asher asked. "If it's all right with you, Billy," was York's reply. With that, York left the show to devote himself to recovery. From season 6 onwards (until the series ended in 1972), the Darrin Stephens role was played by actor Dick Sargent. Sargent was originally offered the role of Darrin in 1964, but turned it down to do a short-lived sitcom called Broadside.
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