When it comes to early American television, cult favorites like I Love Lucy (1951-1957) are near always cited as the original pioneers. True, this and other beloved shows have enjoyed years of accolades, re-released box sets, and oodles of syndication. What isn’t well known, however, is that I Love Lucy was far from the first of its kind. That designation belongs to a little known domestic sitcom about another real-life married couple Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns of Mary Kay & Johnny.
While the British comedy Pinwright’s Progress is credited as the first ever sitcom (1946-1947) Mary Kay & Johnny (1947-1950) featured both an on-air pregnancy, and, gasp, the sharing of a single bed on screen. In doing so, they paved the way for later shows like I Love Lucy to take on battles of their own, which ranged from enhanced filming techniques, to diversity in casting.
It all began with a gamble. Johnny and Mary Kay Stearns had only been married a year when Mary Kay got a gig modeling Junior Wear on a weekly TV show sponsored by the manufacturer. Before then, she was an actress of the theater through and through. Johnny also had experience in the theater - his mother was the founder of the esteemed Peterborough Players, a summer theater troupe in New Hampshire. Of the two, he had slightly more experience in television, having worked briefly on the then experimental Philadelphia WPTZ-TV.
Mary Kay knew little about the work, but was happy for the income. She met with Jay Jossel, the owner of the J.J. Junior’s Dresses, deep in the Garment District of New York City, which was slowly becoming a bustling hub for the new medium. Filming began soon after in DuMont Studio’s space, nestled in the back of the now defunct Wanamaker’s Department Store. These humble origins were that of one of what would be dubbed “The Big Four” of early television, which included DuMont among modern giants like ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Mary Kay & Johnny first aired on November 18th, 1947 at a time where there was far more dead air on the small screen then any actual programming. It was released at a time when the number of television sets was less than 10,000 (a number that would explode to nearly 50 million within the next fifteen years). Content was aired live, as it happened. A television career was far from the illustrious gig it would have been seen as today. Said Mary Kay of the work, “Television,” she said, “was just one of those things that you did to help pay the rent while you were looking for a real job in the Theater.”
To say the early shows of “Mary Kay & Johnny” could be considered “TV programming” was a stretch, to say the least. Each fifteen minute episode consisted of Mary Kay showing off clothing meant for girls half her age on a live feed, quick-changing between short pauses of music. While on set one day, Johnny got into a bet with the program manager that he could make it better, which led to a rather unusual meeting with Jossel, the sponsor. During the meeting, Jossel confided in Johnny: “He said we’re all madly in love with your wife. She’s the cutest thing we ever saw… but, I’m gonna get out of TV because the only sets in New York City are in bars… and I don’t think I’m gonna sell too many JJ Junior dresses to fella’s drinking beer in a bar.”
That much was true. Mass production of television sets in the post-World War II era were on the rise, but had yet to reach the status of being in every home in America. Because of this, bars and storefronts held sway to the demand for passing viewership.
Since they were going off the air anyway, Johnny negotiated using the time slot for a little idea of his own. His pitch was simple: place his darling star of a wife alongside a colorful cast of characters, plug in some story lines, pause for some applause and laughs. The concept would be based off of the success of popular radio dramas like Ozzie and Harriet. Jossel surprisingly agreed, on one condition — they had to sell a product made by his friend, a compact with a mirror inside. Sell enough of them, said Jossel, and he’d consider continuing the airtime.
With that, Johnny got the green light to try an episode on for size.
Johnny went to work in their Village apartment, writing a script about a topic he knew well - the zany exploits of a newlywed couple.
The start of something new: the domestic comedy
The day after their efforts aired, Jossel had received nearly 8,000 requests for the compact mirror featured on the show, far more than the few hundred expected. Mary Kay and Johnny signed a contract for the new series then and there.
At first, the series was recorded in front of a live audience of no more than 15 viewers— 15 viewers for 15 minutes of content. The beginning saw them raking in a mere $50 per week together, which included their writing, acting, producing, and staging of episodes.
The new show would soon be picked up by one of the big four networks, the now long-defunct DuMont Television Network. From there, it would bounce around from station to station, its format evolving from 15 minutes to 30. It would continue to run on and off for the next three years, amassing approximately 300 episodes in its wake.
Future episodes of Mary Kay & Johnny were based loosely on their real life situations as a newlywed couple; ones that lent themselves to the term “situational comedy,” or “sitcom”, though it is also sometimes referred to as a “domestic comedy” like The Honeymooners. On air, the newlyweds lived in an apartment in Greenwich village. Straightlaced Johnny was employed at a bank, while Mary Kay took on the role of his “kooky” wife. They were opposites at their best — the straight man Johnny to Mary Kay’s cute as a button screwball.
The cast played equally wacky, trumped up versions of themselves, from the title pair, to Howard “Howie” Thomas,“ and their soon-to-be born son, Christopher Stearns. Jim Stevenson served as the Announcer, while actor Nydia Westman played Mary Kay Stearns’ mother on screen. Gary Simpson and Delbert Mann became directors on set.
Episode descriptions of the show portray Mary Kay and Johnny in what are now seen as traditional sitcom-like roles. One existing episode, for example, portrays a tiff between Mary Kay and her husband over her lack of “sales resistance.” Soon, Johnny too falls victim to the same “Eager Beaver” sales tactics. Another left a culinary-challenged Johnny alone to finish baking a cake.
This proved a recipe for success for the series, which continued to receive rave reviews throughout its time on air. Variety, for example, commented that “The program has an unforced quality of naturalness, which is its greatest asset."
Write what you know
The reason for the show’s natural affect was because it was based on the couple’s real life. According to Johnny, “If Mary Kay one day got stuck in the elevator, well, it would give me an inspiration about us getting stuck in an elevator." And, funny enough, in one episode she did.
Years later, the show would become more well known for its “notorious” for on-screen shenanigans, many of which are perfectly normal in the current television space. For example, there was just one bed in the apartment on screen, which meant, of course, that the couple must have shared it. This would rarely, if ever, be seen again until at least a decade later.
And then there was the pregnancy. Still in pursuit of her theater dreams in 1948, Mary Kay attempted to hide her pregnancy for as long as she could, which meant quick-changing into a pregnancy-hiding costume in the car en route between tapings in order to keep her part as a teenager in the theater comedy Strange Bedfellows. When hiding the pregnancy ultimately failed, it was decided to write the big news right into the sitcom. Johnny said he remembers thinking, "The whole program is based on our actual married life…so why not write the pregnancy in?" And so they did. Astonishingly, Mary Kay missed only two episodes during this time.
The delivery of Mary Kay’s first child was very different from that of Lucille Ball’s just five years later. Unlike her predecessor, Ball’s cesarean birth was pre-arranged to coincide with the airing of the landmark episode “Lucy Goes to the Hospital”, in which her character on the show gave birth to a baby boy as well. Viewership for that single episode skyrocketed, eclipsing that of other coinciding events like the inauguration of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The birth of Mary Kay’s son Christopher William received far less fanfare by comparison. With little access to the luxury that was pre-taping episodes, Mary Kay’s labor simply happened when it happened, and was written into the show as such. As it happened, the birth just so happened to coincide with a live episode taping. In the episode, Johnny can be seen pacing a waiting room floor just 30 minutes after the real-time arrival of his first-born son. True to form, within days, Christopher William would go on to make his own shining debut alongside his parents on the small screen.
So, how did the series get away with so many social snafus that would soon be seen as on-air faux pas? The truth is that the early days of television are akin to the Wild West, or, perhaps more appropriately, flinging spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. Programs like Mary Kay & Johnny were just trying things out as they went along. The series barely managed to end its run untouched by The National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters code of 1952, which reads like the restrictive Hay’s Code for Hollywood, but for TV. It was therefore not held to the same strict standards.
The series would move from DuMont in August of 1948 to NBC in the Fall. NBC then aired the program from October of 1948 to February 1949. CBS took over briefly from March 1949 until June, at which point NBC took it for one final spin from June of 1949 to March of 1950.
The start of the new decade proved troublesome for the series. In the post-WWII boom, TV sets were becoming more and more accessible. With them came a wider audience… and more competition.
Back on the Mary Kay & Johnny set, the final move to NBC and half hour programming necessitated more writers. The stories were so close to home for Johnny that he soon found it impossible to find new talent that could keep up. Johnny proved less than enthused with the scripts they came up with as a result. And then there was the growing fatigue of maintaining their new grueling work schedule. A single summer found them producing a show nearly every weeknight to keep up with the breaks afforded to other series. After a while, Johnny found it difficult to come up with new and fresh material.
Said Johnny about the writing process in a later interview with the Television Academy Foundation, “... Because I was writing about the two of us, things that actually happened, it went very quickly [at first]. I could hardly wait to get through one to start another. But as the years went on it became harder and harder and there would be nights where I’d sit up and look at a typewriter all night long and couldn’t think of a thing simply because I wasn’t a professional writer.”
Making things even more complicated, Mary Kay found out she was pregnant, again, with their second child.
In the end, it all proved too much. The final episode would air on March 11, 1950. To this day, the exact number of total episodes aired is unclear, though estimates put that number at around 300 in total.
Pioneers on both coasts
Mary Kay would go on to host Mary Kay’s Nightcap for NBC shortly thereafter. What she’d once done for new releases of junior’s dresses, she now did for upcoming NBC programs. She also appeared in Kraft Theater and alongside her husband in commercials for U.S. Steel. Within a few years, however, the Stearns family transplanted back to the West Coast. Once there, she would drop out of the spotlight in order to raise their growing family.
Years later, Gary Simpson, who served as a director for the show, would glowingly showcase Mary Kay’s talent. “She could have made it big time, but her personal life didn’t lend itself that way… She’d never become a big star, but she might have. She had the talent.” He added that she had a delightful personality and a very charming way of talking. “[She was] a very individual character, a loveable type, but a little zany, a little screwball… people enjoyed watching her.”
Johnny, meanwhile, supported the family financially. He continued to direct and produce early TV programs, including an early version of The Tonight Show and Make Me Laugh. He also hosted and produced the public affairs program Ag, USA for decades.
Just a few short years before his death in 2001, Johnny resurfaced in an unlikely fashion, writing in for an op-ed correction to a newspaper in 1995. The Wall Street Journal had erroneously cited another mother with the infamous distinction of TV’s first pregnant character in prime time. Johnny set about setting the record straight in the best way he could.
“Mary Kay shared her pregnancy with the network audience for the full nine months... The birth occurred shortly before airtime, which gave scriptwriter, co-star, [and] husband Johnny a timely conclusion for that episode. I can attest to these facts for I was there.” The op-ed was wittily titled “Mary Kay & Johnny & Baby Made Three”.
The technology of why they are largely unknown
So, why don't audiences know more about this pioneering series? The problem is, the same TV landscape that made the brand new frontier of sitcoms possible was also its downfall. Shows like I Love Lucy managed to capitalize on the growing Hollywood landscape, famously perfecting the use of three 35mm cameras alongside a live audience. The better equipment made for better recordings. By contrast, the New York based TV scene used kinescope to broadcast live from the East Coast, where most television sets were at the time. The West Coast, meanwhile, received a later version of what was recorded, if anything at all. The result was a picture quality that couldn’t compete with shows like I Love Lucy.
Said I Love Lucy cinematographer Karl Freund, “Retakes, a standard procedure on the Hollywood scene, are not desirable in making TV films with audience participation. Dubbed-in laughs are artificial . . . Close-ups, another routine step in standard film-making, were discarded since such glamour treatment stood out like a sore thumb.”
In contrast, the broadcast of Mary Kay and Johnny was not recorded at all prior to 1948. Before this, everything was shot and broadcast simultaneously in true live TV format throughout its first year. After this time, they were recorded live, and shown on delay for the West Coast using the kinescope method.
Then there’s the cold hard reality of of syndication. Syndication became a burgeoning topic following the first syndication of the anthology series Fireside Theater in 1949. I Love Lucy’s use of quality 35mm film helped them out greatly in this regard, as did Desilu Studios’, the brainchild of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s, successful negotiation of lower salaries in exchange for the rights to the series. Soon, Desilu became the first independent studio to profit from off-network reruns. It’s still a gift that's kept on giving, raking in $20 million for CBS in 2012 alone.
The same unfortunately cannot be said for Mary Kay & Johnny. In the years of mergers and acquisitions that followed, much of DuMont’s original programming was lost. Wrote Ed McMahon and David C. Fisher in their book, When Television Was Young, "Unfortunately, these kinescopes survived only until the 1970s when ABC dumped all the old DuMont programs into the New York Bay and CBS trashed its own old kinescopes." With it went all evidence of the shared bed arrangements and Mary Kay’s on-air pregnancy. The sad truth is they’re far from the only ones. As early as the 1950s, the BBC was notorious for wiping video tapes for storage. TV was considered far more of a short-term medium at the time, much like live theater or radio broadcasts. The fate of Mary Kay & Johnny seems particularly cruel, having been laid to waste in a body of water that runs through the very city that served as a landmark setting for their pioneering series.
Luckily, a remaining episode can be found at The Paley Center for Media. Visitors to the New York City location can view the just over 14 minute clip in person. Those unable to visit, meanwhile, will just have to settle for envisioning modern day sitcom troupes in a pilot from yesteryear.
Amanda Minchin is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist, and all-around content creator, with top nods from the Georgia Shorts Film Festival, WeScreenplay TV Lab, Mad Wife Top 100 Scripts, and Coverfly, among others. A bona fide library enthusiast, she’s moonlit as a TV and Film Writer, as well as a Script Reader for top screenwriting contests like the Austin Film Festival. This summer, a selection from her short play Writer’s Block - A Horror Story premiered at her hometown theater.
Sources & Further Reading
McMahon, Ed; Fisher, David C. (2007). When Television Was Young: The Inside Story with Memories by Legends of the Small Screen, T. Nelson, Nashville, TN.
Robinson, Mark A. (2019). Sitcommentary: Television Comedies That Changed America, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated.
Mary Kay & Johnny, Television Academy Video Interview
Mary Kay & Johnny & Baby Made Three Stearns, John A., Wall Street Journal, Oct 20, 1995, pg. A13.
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