A brief history of TV couples sleeping in the same bed

[mahatmakanejeeves]

DID YOU KNOW?

A brief history of TV couples sleeping in the same bed

No, the Flintstones nor the Bradys were not the first to share a bed. Not by a longshot.

Jan 10, 2022, 4:14PM By MeTV Staff

{snip}

It all began shortly after World War II…

1. Mary Kay and Johnny



1947

This sitcom racked up a lot of firsts. Easy to do when you are literally the first sitcom in the history of television. Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns were married in real life. That perhaps allowed folks to not get too worked up about them sharing a bed. Or working Mary Kay's pregnancy into the show. (Sorry, I Love Lucy was not the first to do that.) The show premiered on the long-dead DuMont Network, before briefly jumping to CBS and settling on NBC. So why is Mary Kay and Johnny so forgotten? There were only 250,000 TV sets in America in 1947, and the series was largely a regional affair out of New York. And episodes were broadcast live, with little thought of preservation. Only one is known to exist, in the Paley Center.

{snip}

[underpants]

1. Green Acres - that was pretty spicy for 1967

😲

Two TV side notes.
The Goldbergs was a radio and then TV show about a Jewish family that covered 1929 to 1956. Amazing that a Jewish family was featured at the time but maybe that’s just me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldbergs_(broadcast_series)

There is no footage of the first Super Bowl except for hand held footage taken by the Sabel family operation. Film was expensive back then so only shows like Lucy were saved on it. Some upstart thing like the Super Bowl wasn’t deemed worth saving. Two networks showed it. NBC covered the AFL and CBS covered the NFL. There were two second half kick offs. NBC was in a commercial when the first kick off happened so NFL execs scrambled to have CBS cut to commercial so NBC could have a kick off. Rosell and others prayed there wasn’t a kickoff return vastly different than the first one let alone a TD. After the dust settled both networks zoomed in as close as possible so viewers couldn’t tell that the ball wasn’t in the same spot. No one seemed to notice and the game went on.

[Croney]

2. I love The Goldbergs, that old one.

I tape it and rewatch the few episodes. Gertrude Berg was wonderful.