October 1, 1955
To The Moon, Alice!
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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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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. That left 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.1
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, soaking up the comics and emcees 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 even when he had little material to work with.
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.
Perfect for Television
From the club circuit he 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 variety show Cavalcade of Stars, where he developed such vivid characters as the champagne-swilling aristocrat Reginald Van Gleason III and the warm but world-weary confidante 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. 2The 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 $135,000 per week – $7 million a year – in 2025 dollars. 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.
An Instant Hit
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.3
The show started out with the usual mix of elements: a live orchestra, dancers, monologues, sketches, and recurring characters, all revolving around Gleason’s canny 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 ten- and twenty-minute domestic comedies. Ralph and the sharp-tongued Alice pulled in larger audiences every week, their dialog often punctuated with Ralph threatening to send his wife “to the moon, Alice!”
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.
Gleason 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.4 The Jackie Gleason show looked like, well, television.
Through friends he’d maintained from his early years with DuMont, Gleason was aware of a development that could not only put his show on a visual parity with Lucy, but could also give him a leg up in preserving the live performance aspect of his comedy.
The DuMont Electronicam
At DuMont, engineer James L. Caddigan mounted both an Image Orthicon-based live television camera and a 35mm film camera on the same pedestal, arranging them so that they shared a single lens5. The light passing through that lens was split: one path fed the live broadcast, the other was recorded on high quality film stock.
The resulting camera was a bit of a beast, but two months after DuMont’s “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 Electronicams, 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, October 1, 1955, at 8:30 PM, 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 Kramden & Company directly opposite NBC’s highly-rated Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall 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 #19 overall for the 1955–56 season – respectable, but far below Gleason’s variety show, which had consistently ranked in the Top 10. Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall remained a consistent Top 5 program through the entire season.
The “Classic 39”
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. Satisfied that the concept had run its course, he pulled the plug after filming only one season of 39 episodes.
Part of what gave those 39 episodes their lasting appeal was the unique hybrid that DuMont’s Electronicam delivered: the original show went out live, offering the stage-bound intimacy that made audiences at home feel like they were looking in on Ralph, Alice, Ed, and Trixie in their natural habitat – a shabby Brooklyn apartment. But 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. In 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.
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 starting in 1964 from Miami Beach, featuring new Honeymooner sketches.6 Over four seasons, the new Honeymooners was broadcast in color, with new actresses in the wives’ roles: Sheila MacRae as Alice Kramden and Jean Kean 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 Kramden under the Eiffel Tower, but it’s not hard to imagine Jackie Gleason telling the network, “this is where we’re gonna shoot.”
In the 1970s, the original cast of Gleason, Meadows, Carney, and Randolph returned for several reunion specials on CBS, including The Honeymooners: The Second Honeymoon (1976) and The Honeymooners Christmas Special (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 16mm film camera at a studio monitor. 7These 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 a legend that had lasted far beyond the stand-alone show’s single season.
Television made him a household name, but his career after The Honeymooners proved there was more to Jackie 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 Hustler8. He alternated between comedy and drama, starring in films such as Gigot (1962), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963), and Soldier in the Rain (1963). From 1977-83 he reached a new level of box office success and fame as Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit films.
Though he died in 1987 at the age of 71, the character that Jackie Gleason created in Ralph Kramden became a cultural archetype that has lated for generations.
Not Just A Character – An Archetype
By one account, when William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created The Flintstones in 1960, they pitched it as an animated, stone-age adaption 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 (All In the Family, 1971-1979); John Goodman’s Dan Conner (Roseanne, 1988–1997); Ed O’Neill’s Al Bundy (Married… with Children, 1987–1997) and Kevin James’ Doug Heffernan (The King of Queens, 1998–2007). 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 owe their cultural lineage to a bombastic bus driver who came out of the pool halls of Brooklyn in the 1930s.
There are tons of The Honeymooners on YouTube. Here’s one clip to whet your appetite.
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1 When he was born in 1916, Jackie had an older brother, Clement, who died in 1919, reportedly from meningitis.
2 The rise and fall of the DuMont network is covered in Countdown 64 re: TV coverage of the Army/McCarthy Senate Hearings in 1954, which DuMont and ABC carried gavel-to-gavel.
3 CBS Studio 50 is more familiar to contemporary viewers as The Ed Sullivan Theater – home to The Late Show, first with David Letterman and then with Stephen Colbert until the networks’s new owners put thefranchise out to pasture in May, 2026.
4 Deși Arnaz’s bargain with CBS to produce I Love Lucy on 35mm film was covered in Countdown #72
5 The provenance of the Image Orthicon – and its reliance on Philo Farnsworth’s original 1927 patents, is covered in Countdown #89.
6 In order to entice Jackie Gleason back onto the network, CBS accepted his demand to set him up in his own little TV kingdom outside of New York or Hollywood. By the mid-60s, Gleason had permanently relocated to Miami Beach, Florida, mostly so he could golf play year-round, so CBS built him a production facility at the Miami Beach Auditorium, where the announcer opened each episode with “From the sun and fun capital of the world — Miami Beach! — it’s The Jackie Gleason Show!”
7 The name “kinescope” is another one of RCA’s imprints on the origins of the television. The original “kinescope” was an improved cathode ray tube introduced in 1929 and attributed to the same Vladimir Zworykin who still did not have a viable electronic camera tube two years after Farnsworth first successfully tested his Image Dissector. As with RCA’s trademark for the Image Orthicon tube (Milestone #89), the persistence of the term “kinescope” reminds us that the corporate behemoth that was RCA was much better at naming things than actually inventing them.
8 Jackie Gleason was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 34th Academy Awards (1962) for his performance as Minnesota Fats in The Hustler. The Oscar that year went to George Chakiris for his role as Bernardo in West Side Story.
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