Mary Kay and Johnny

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Mary Kay and Johnny
Genre	Sitcom
Running time	15 minutes per episode (1947-1948, 1949) 30 minutes per episode (1948-1949, 1950)
Creator(s)	Mary Kay Stearns and Johnny Stearns
Starring	Mary Kay Stearns Johnny Stearns Howard Thomas Nydia Westman Christopher William Stearns
Country of origin	United States
Original channel	DuMont, CBS, NBC
Original run	November 18, 1947–March 11, 1950
No. of episodes	About 300
IMDb profile

Mary Kay and Johnny was probably the first situation comedy broadcast on television in the United States. It debuted on the DuMont Television Network in the USA on Tuesday, November 18, 1947. The fifteen-minute-long weekly sitcom starred Mary Kay Stearns and Johnny Stearns, who were married in real life. The Stearns created and wrote all the scripts for the show. The program was broadcast live, most of the action taking place on a set representing the New York City apartment of the title characters, a young married couple.

After a year on DuMont the show moved to CBS for half a year (much of the time being broadcast every weeknight), and then ran for one more year each Saturday night on NBC, which broadcast the final episode on March 11, 1950.

In 1948 Mary Kay became pregnant and after unsuccessfully trying to hide it her pregnancy was written into the show. On New Year's Eve 1948 their son Christopher appeared on the show and became a character. He was less than one month old at his first appearance and thus one of the youngest "actors" ever to appear on television.

Prior to 1948 the sitcom was shown live and not recorded but early on in 1948 it began recording episodes onto kinescopes so that they could be shown on the Pacific Coast. The entire series from then until 1950 was recorded this way (as pre recording did not exist yet). Many episodes survived in full as late as 1975 and the show was in syndication on many NBC and CBS affilites (especically on the West Coast). In the late 1970s, all of the former DuMont programs were junked by ABC (most by dumping into New York Bay). CBS trashed a lot of the now grainy kinescopes during the late 1970's. The fate of the NBC episodes is unknown, but fragments of the shows last few episodes survive, most on grainy 16 mm film reels. These are not commercally available, but TV Land used a clip in an episode of Inside TV Land called Taboo TV.

1 Trivia
2 Sources
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Trivia

This was the first TV show to show a couple sharing a bed
A clip of a later episode can be seen on the TV Land show Inside TV Land
Featured TV's first-on screen pregnancy

[edit] Sources

Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh (2003). The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946–Present, 8th ed., New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0345455428.