The Chicago Teddy Bears

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The Chicago Teddy Bears was a situation comedy which was broadcast in the United States by CBS as part of its 1971 fall lineup.

Prohibition-era Chicago has always been fodder for plots about its intrigues, ever since it was contemporary; most of the resulting entertainment has centered around violent confrontations between criminal gangs and the police or between factions of gangsters and while it might occasionally contain comic elements functioning as comic relief, the bulk of it was generally unsentimental, as seen in The Untouchables. However, The Chicago Teddy Bears was basically a straight sitcom, where the threat of violence was mainly inferential rather than overt; unlike the group which inspired the show's title, the Chicago Bears, then and now the city's NFL team, these "bears" were not particularly aggressive.

In The Chicago Teddy Bears, Linc McCray (Dean Jones) and his Uncle Latzi (John Banner) were partners in a speakeasy. As it was fairly successful, small-time hood Nick Marr (Art Metrano) wanted to muscle in on it. Actually, Nick was also Linc's first cousin and also Latzi's nephew; the naive Latzi couldn't believe that another one of his nephews could really be anything but a fine boy. However, Marvin the bookkeeper (Marvin Kaplan) and Linc's inept bodyguards, notably Duke (Jamie Farr), were very frightened of Nick.

This program received low ratings for at least two reasons, one being the fact that it was aired on Friday night, traditionally a low-viewership night, but more because it was getting beaten in the ratings, badly, by The Brady Bunch. The Chicago Teddy Bears was cancelled by CBS after only three months on the air.