Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony it's the same old cry welcome back
[00:00:22] Speaker B: to 100 Years of Television.
This is episode number 44, Countdown 63 to the Moon Alice For 100 weeks that started in October 2025, this podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it first appeared on Earth. Paul I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode we watched Senator Joseph McCarthy wither before television cameras in the 1954 Senate hearings carried live on the ABC and Dumont networks.
Today we'll witness the birth of one of TV's most classic comedies.
Herbert John Gleason was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 26, 1916 to second generation Irish American parents.
His father, Herbert, sold insurance before deserting the family in 1925, leaving his mother Maisie to support herself as a subway booth attendant and raise her young son alone in the cold water tenements of Brooklyn's Bushwick and Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhoods.
Maisie's rambunctious son was a poor student, preferring to spend more time in pool halls and vaudeville houses than at school.
He gave up formal education altogether at age 16 when Maisie died in 1932.
As a teenager, Gleason spent his time hustling pool, doing odd jobs around Brooklyn and hanging out in clubs, marveling at the comics and MCs who could hold a room with just timing and swagger.
He performed in local amateur nights until he found steady work in rough and tumble clubs up and down the east coast, learning to read audiences, pace a laugh and fill a stage with a larger than life personality.
Though he was born Herbert John, everyone in Brooklyn knew him as Jack, and as his popularity grew on the club circuit in the 1930s, audiences came to know him as Jackie Gleason.
From the club circuit, Gleason graduated to small parts on Broadway and in B movies. By the 1940s he was doing radio comedy and character roles in Hollywood, but Gleason's broad comic style proved better suited to the close up intimacy of the smaller screen of television.
In 1950, he took over the Dumont Network's variety show Cavalcade of Stars, where he developed such vivid characters as the champagne swilling aristocrat Reginald Van Gleeson iii, and the warm but world weary confidant Joe the bartender.
And then Jackie Gleason breathed life into a loudmouthed Brooklyn bus driver named Ralph Kramden.
On October 5, 1951, the blustery Kramden character made his first appearance on Cavalcade of Stars in a sketch called the Honeymooners, with Pert Kelton as Ralph's beleaguered wife Alice and Art Carney as their neighbor, the New York sewer worker, Ed Norton.
With the arrival of Ralph, Alice and the Honeymooners, Cavalcade of Stars made Jackie Gleason a sensation. On the struggling dumont network.
The bigger players sat up and took notice.
In 1952, CBS lured Gleason away with one of the richest contracts in television. A reported $11,000 a week, which is roughly equivalent to about $135,000 per week, or 7 million a year in $2026.
Throw in a share of the show's profits that CBS also agreed to, and Jackie Gleason became one of the highest paid entertainers in America, rivaling even the most famous Hollywood stars.
The new Jackie Gleason show premiered on September 20, 1952 from CBS Studio 50 in Manhattan, now known as the Ed Sullivan Theater, and it instantly became one of the network's biggest hits.
The show started out with the usual mix of the live orchestra, dancers, monologues, sketches and recurring charact, all revolving around Gleason's uncanny mix of precision and spontaneity.
He famously refused to rehearse, preferring instead to rely on instinct and timing.
In that environment, the Honeymooners evolved into 10 and 20 minute domestic comedies. Ralph and the sharp tongued Alice pulled in larger audiences every week, their dialogue often punctuated with Ralph threatening to send his wife
[00:05:47] Speaker A: bang. Soon, I'm going to the moon.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: For the three seasons that the Jackie Gleason show aired on CBS, from the fall of 1952 until the spring of 1955, it sat near the top of the national Nielsen ratings, Second only to TV's biggest hit, I Love Lucy, Gleeson was convinced that one reason Lucy consistently outranked him was the sheer visual quality of the show.
Because of the bargain Desi Arnaz struck with CBS to produce I Love Lucy on 35mm film, every episode looked like a Hollywood movie. The Jackie Gleason show looked like, well, television.
Through friends, he'd maintained from his early years with Dumont, Gleeson was aware of a development that could not only put his show on a visual parody with Lucy, but could also give him a leg up in preserving the live performance aspect of his comedy.
At Dumont, engineer James L. Cadigan mounted both an image orthicon based live television camera and a 35 millimeter film camera on the same pedestal, arranging them so that they shared a single lens.
The light passing through that lens was split. One path fed the live broadcast, the other was recorded on high quality film stuff.
The resulting camera was a bit of a beast, but two months after the Dumont electronicam was announced, Gleason put his show on hiatus so that he could focus on developing the Honeymooners into a half hour sitcom.
Dumont's hybrid camera was central to his plans.
Even though I Love Lucy was filmed before a live studio audience.
Each episode was shot film style, the stop and start multi take method borrowed from feature films.
Gleason wanted the best of both worlds. He wanted the non stop spontaneity of a live television broadcast and the flexibility of film editing and distribution.
Dumont's system was uniquely suited for that purpose.
Gleason not only insisted that CBS use three electronic cams, but but he arranged for the Honeymooners to be shot at the Adelphi theater on West 54th Street, a Dumont owned facility.
The Honeymooners premiered on Saturday 1st October 1955 at 8:30pm with Audrey Meadows replacing Pert Kelton as Alice, Art Carney reprising his role as Ed Norton and Joyce Randolph joining the cast as Ed's wife Trixie.
Slotting the show at 8:30 on Saturdays was a bold counter programming move by CBS.
The thinking behind slating Cramden Co. Directly opposite Perry Como's highly rated Kraft Music hall on NBC, was simple.
Como attracted a family audience. Gleason would appeal to the working class looking for laughs instead of songs.
The scheduling was daring, but didn't really work out as CBS had hoped.
The Honeymooners started out on a high note, but its ratings never matched Perry Como's.
According to the Nielsen rankings, The Honeymooners finished 19th overall for the 1955-56 season.
Respectable, but far below Gleason's variety show, which had consistently ranked in the top 10.
The Honeymooners was by no means a flop. It drew millions of viewers every week, but its ratings declined steadily into the spring of 1956.
At that point, Gleason was exhausted from the grind of writing, rehearsing, filming and editing a show every week and satisfied the concept had run its course. Pulled the Plug after filming only one season of 39 episodes.
Part of what has given those 39 episodes their lasting appeal was the unique hybrid that Dumont's electronic cam delivered.
The original show went out live, offering the stage bound intimacy that made audiences home feel like they were looking in on Ralph, Alice, Ed and Trixie in their natural habitat, a shabby Brooklyn apartment.
Then the film copy was fine tuned in editing, producing from that one season what has gone down in TV history as the Honeymooners Classic 39.
After Gleason pulled the plug, CBS broadcast reruns of the classic 39. But in syndication, the show achieved a degree of cultural immortality.
By the early 1960s, the episodes were sold to local stations around the country, where they ran day and night with such ubiquity that the Honeymooners became a permanent fixture of television's black and white afterlife.
And despite canceling himself after just 39 episodes, Gleason kept the legend alive.
In 1962, he returned to CBS with a revived Jackie Gleason show, first from New York and then, starting in 1964, from Miami beach, featuring new honeymooner sketches.
Over four seasons, the new Honeymooners was broadcast in color with new actresses in the wives, Sheila McCray as Alice Cramden and Jean Keane as Trixie Norton.
The new installments were longer and often expanded into hour long trip episodes like the Kramdens and the Nortons Go to Paris.
It might be hard to imagine Ralph Kramdon under the Eiffel Tower, but it's not hard to imagine Jackie Gleason telling the network, we're going to Paris and we're going to shoot a show.
In the 1970s, the original cast of Gleeson, Meadows, Carney and Randolph returned for several reunion specials on CBS, including the Honeymooners the Second Honeymoon in 1976 and the Honeymooners Christmas Special in 1978, the very first episodes of the Honeymooners, the sketches that aired on Dumont's Cavalcade of Stars and CBS's the Jackie Gleason show were only recorded as kinescopes, the industry's fancy name for aiming a 16 millimeter film camera at a studio monitor.
These episodes were believed long lost or even destroyed until the 1980s, when they turned up in Gleason's personal archives in Florida.
Syndicated and released on home video, they added more than a hundred new Honeymooners segments, adding another installment to the legend that had lasted far beyond the standalone show's single season.
Television made him a household name, but his career after the Honeymooners proved there was much more to Jack gleason. Than Ralph Kramden's bluster.
In 1961, he drew on his roots in the pool halls of Brooklyn to deliver an Oscar worthy performance as Minnesota Fats opposite Paul Newman in the Hustler.
He alternated between comedy and drama, starring in films such as Gigot and Requiem for a heavyweight in 1962 and Pompa's delicate condition and soldier in the rain in 1963.
And from 1977 until 1983, he reached a new level of box office success and fame as Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit films.
Jackie Gleason lived as lavish a life as any of his alter egos.
Though he died in 1987 at the age of 71, the character that Gleason created in Ralph Kramden became a cultural archetype that lasted for generations.
For example, by one account, when William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created the Flintstones in 1960, they pitched it as an animated Stone Age adaptation of the Honeymooners.
At the time, William Hanna said the Honeymooners was the most popular show on the air and for my Bill, the funniest that influenced greatly what we did with the Flintstones.
The legacy doesn't stop there.
Among the characters that grew out of the seed planted by Gleason as Kramden are Carroll O' Connor's Archie Bunker in All in the Family from 1971 to 1979, John Goodman's Dan Connor in Roseanne from 1988 to 1997, Ed O' Neill's Al Bundy in Married with Children from 1987 to 1997, and Kevin James Doug Heffernan in the King of Queens from 1998 to 2007, and the archetype continues today in the longest running animated series in television history, the Simpsons.
There were only 39 episodes of the original Honeymooners, but Archie and Edith Bunker, Dan and Roseanne Connor, Al and Peg Bundy, Doug and Carrie Heffernan, Marge and Homer Simpson, generations of television programming all own their cultural lineage. To a bombastic bus driver who came out of the pool halls of BROOKLYN in the 1930s, this brings us to the end of 63 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when Elvis Presley swivels his hips for Ed Sullivan and CBS sensors cut him off at the waist.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin, and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:16:25] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy they laughed at us and ha.
But how, how, how.
