Even when I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet had a certain reputation, as a somewhat bland brand of entertainment. Even though I watched a lot of reruns, Ozzie and Harriet were never on. The only time I saw them in a TV listing was for a PBS marathon that was way past my bedtime.

I watched a VHS release of their 1952 movie Here Come the Nelsons and found it pretty funny at the time. Whether I still would I don’t know as it was never released on DVD, and the entire TV series waited decades for an official DVD release, even as public domain episodes became available from various companies. The official DVD releases of the first two seasons came out in 2022, with the entire series landing on DVD in 2023. Now the entire series is available for streaming through Amazon – all fourteen, yes, fourteen seasons, adding to more than four hundred episodes. That’s more than stalwarts like Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. 

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett began airing on television in 1952, the year after I Love Lucy premiered over at CBS. By the time it left, The Andy Griffith show had been on the air for five seasons, and Get Smart had just finished its first. Yet its history was even longer than that, as Ozzie and Harriet had begun over radio.

Before The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet

Harriet Hilliard (born Peggy Lou Snyder) was a singer when she met bandleader Ozzie Nelson. The two worked together on programs for the Bakers of America in the 1930s and were married in 1935. In 1941, they joined the Raleigh Cigarette program featuring Red Skelton. Ozzie led the band and Harriet served as vocalist and also appeared in the comedic sketches, most notably as the mother of Junior, Skelton’s “Mean Widdle Kid” character.

In 1944, Skelton was drafted, leading to the end of his radio program, but this would provide an opportunity for the couple. Ozzie wanted to find a way for them to spend more time with their children, and a radio sitcom proved the perfect opportunity to shift their careers from their more demanding schedule.

America’s Favorite Young Couple

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet premiered in October 1944, and was a domestic comedy based on the Nelsons’ home life. Ozzie and Harriet, aged thirty-seven and thirty-nine, were billed as “America’s Favorite Young Couple” and continued to be billed as such well into their forties (one of those things you could get away with over radio). The series was initially heard over CBS, but later switched to NBC, and finally ABC. The series was sponsored by International Silver and later by Heinz.

For the first five years, the Nelsons’ sons David and Ricky were played by child actors, until a 1948 guest appearance by Bing Crosby pushed Ozzie towards having their sons play themselves, starting in 1949.

John Brown was the most prominent supporting cast member. He played Ozziet and Harriet’s neighbor, Mister Thornberry, or “Thorny.” It’s worth noting that, for much of the run, Brown was also a regular cast member on the sitcoms My Friend Irma as Irma’s boyfriend Al, and on The Life of Riley as both Riley’s neighbor Gillis and Digby O’Dell, “the friendly undertaker.” Brown was therefore doing triple duty most weeks until the early 1950s, or perhaps quadruple if you count both Life of Riley roles.

The Circulating Episodes

The series aired 402 episodes over the radio, of which around eighty are in circulation. The various websites that post the series feature a lot of mis-dated and duplicate episodes. I tried to listen to every episode and ended up having to use three or four sources to find them all.

In general, the circulating episodes are spread throughout the series run, with a higher number of episodes coming from the last season, and only two episodes from 1946 in circulation. This is only because long-running comedy programs evolve, and the episodes of Ozzie and Harriet that were considered worthy of saving come towards the tail end of its run over radio, rather than the earliest years. I can only evaluate what I have, but it’s always possible that more episodes might alter the evaluation of the series.

Review of the Episodes

In some early episodes, Ozzie and Harriet did the sort of musical skits that they did on The Red Skelton Show, but this ended early in the series run. What remained was a style of comedy that stood out from its peers for what it wasn’t as much as what it was.

For one thing, there were no catchphrases. Old Time Radio comedies of the era relied on them. You’ll find no equivalent to, “Tain’t funny, McGee,” “You’re looking fine, very natural,” “What a revoltin’ development this is,”  “Well, now, I wouldn’t say that,” or “Hello, my fellow, pupil,” recurring lines that filled other sitcoms and earned the actors laughter and applause before an actual joke

The comedy felt more grounded than many of its old-time radio contemporaries  There were comic misunderstandings, a scheme or two, and a few lies told throughout the series, but it never reached a point where it stretched your disbelief. The series didn’t rely on characters being inordinately stupid, greedy, or out of touch with reality to make the plot work. In some ways, I think it’s less discussed than most other old-time radio comedies because it’s so different.

Most episodes center around Ozzie’s ill-fated ideas. Ozzie is written as the one person in the Nelson house most likely to get carried away with some new fancy gizmo, make a big bet, propose major changes to the family, and the one most likely to put on airs or to boast of something that reality won’t cash. The other source of comedy is the Nelson boys, acting like brothers and finding ways to pick at each other, with Ricky, especially, having some great lines. Harriet is likable, charming, and always seems to be a step ahead of Ozzie in the end.

The series has some fairly clever episodes. My favorite had to be the episode where Ozzie and Thorny try to boost the neglected small-town minor league baseball club, and get some help from a local used-car salesman (played by Gale Gordon), who has some ideas on how to improve the team. This is probably peak writing for the series, and also an interesting turn for Gordon, whose later career was defined by playing bombastic authoritarians like Osgood Conklin with a slow burn. This really showed some of his range as a performer.

If the series has one fault, it’s that it feels almost too domestic, particularly in some episodes where the action (such as it is) doesn’t leave the Nelsons’ home. Indeed, there are way too many circulating episodes where everything happens either at their house or immediately next door. Also, there’s a certain generic feeling to the series, with the lack of recurring characters in their generic (and never-named) suburban hometown, and Ozzie having a job that’s never specifically mentioned in the radio episodes, and even the local store that is known as “The Emporium”, rather than a specific name. That the episodes have a general feeling of things going wrong precisely when Ozzie tries anything new leads to a (perhaps unintentional) ethos of, “Do what you’ve always done. You’re a fool if you try to do anything different.” So, if you wanted to create some superficially pleasant 1950s sitcom world with a dark reality behind it, this would probably be what you’d base it on.

Also, I think Harriet is almost too nice and too understanding. While Ozzie isn’t at the extreme end of boneheaded radio sitcom husbands, he does some things that most wives would lose their cool over. I actually got a thrill from the one episode in which Harriet loses her temper with him when he tries to teach her to play golf.

Conclusion:

All in all, The Ozzie and Harriett radio program comes down to a matter of taste. For what it is, it works. It’s a light, mostly inoffensive family comedy that’s generally a bit more subdued than its contemporaries. If you prefer the more extreme situations of something like The Burns and Allen Show, or the characters that inhabit places like Summerfield in The Great Gildersleeve, this may not be for you. But if you’re in a mood for a comedy that’s a bit silly, and you can overlook the overly generic nature of the setting, this may be worth seeking out.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5