Long before I Love Lucy made the whole country laugh, there was another show. A real married couple. A tiny 15-minute format. And a place in history that almost nobody knows about.
It was called Mary Kay and Johnny. It starred Mary Kay Stearns and Johnny Stearns, a husband and wife playing themselves. It was the first American sitcom ever made, and it aired as far back as 1947.
The show was built around one simple idea. Johnny once explained it plainly: if they were totally themselves, nobody could say they did not believe them. So they wrote close to home, dramatizing real moments from their actual lives and going for laughs along the way.
The show racked up a quiet list of firsts. Mary Kay became the first pregnant female character in TV history when the couple had a baby in real life six months into the series. Johnny simply wrote it into the scripts.
They were also the first married couple to share a bed on television. That was three years before Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were not allowed to do the same thing on I Love Lucy.
When their son Christopher was born, the cast and crew did not skip a beat. An episode was filmed just 30 minutes after the birth, with Johnny pacing the waiting room on screen. Mary Kay missed only two episodes total. Christopher made his own TV debut at less than two weeks old.
The show ran on the DuMont Television Network, CBS, and NBC before ending in March of 1950. Mary Kay and Johnny stayed married for 55 years. Johnny died in 2001 at the age of 85. Mary Kay passed in 2018 at the age of 93.
Here is the heartbreaking part. Almost nothing of the show survives. Most of the DuMont network’s recordings were destroyed in 1975, when their film library on 16 mm was dumped into New York’s East River to clear space for a new tenant.
Only one episode of Mary Kay and Johnny still exists. The Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles holds the sole surviving copy.
A new book, 100 Years of Laughter: American Comedy in the Twentieth Century by Gary Berman, is one of the few places you can learn the full story of this forgotten trailblazer. It is a remarkable piece of television history and a reminder of how much from our early TV years is simply gone.
