I Married Joan, a 1952-1955 television situation comedy, starred veteran vaudeville, film, and radio comedienne Joan Davis (1907-1961) as the scatterbrained, manic wife of mild-mannered community judge Bradley Stevens Jim Backus, on NBC. The judge's court sessions weren't even close to the absurdities presented by his wife, who got the couple into and out of numerous whacky jams, with or without the help of her younger sister (played by Davis's real-life daughter, Beverly Wills).

I Married Joan aimed at the audience for its most obvious influence, I Love Lucy, a year older and already the top-rated situation comedy in television. Davis had proven, in vaudeville and on film, that she was at least Lucille Ball's equal as a physical comedienne. But Ball had facility in both physical and verbal comedy. Davis, though good in dialogue, didn't have Ball's staggering array of vocalisms and verbal mannerisms; nor did she have the writing talent Ball had cultivated from her own late-1940s radio days (My Favorite Husband). The upshot was that I Married Joan did not sustain an audience, and never rated higher than third in any significant market.

Each week, the show announced itself, during a lull in its a cappella opening theme (sung by the Roger Wagner Chorale), as "America's favorite comedy show, starring America's queen of comedy, Joan Davis, as Mrs. Joan Stevens." Davis may have been popular enough in her B-movie and radio days, but ballyhooing the star of a Lucy derivative as the nation's queen of comedy was unfair to Davis (and would have been to anyone else) in the extreme, considering Ball had the clear claim upon the title and wouldn't let go of it for almost two full decades. (In fairness, Davis was also billed likewise in her radio years---and that, too, may have seemed effronterous, considering the popularity of such as Gracie Allen and Fanny Brice.)

But there was an obvious rapport between co-stars Davis and Backus (though he later admitted he wasn't thrilled about playing second banana at the time), to say nothing of that between Davis and daughter Wills, and those factors were probably the most compelling reason why the show lasted more than a single season at all. Its final regular telecast was in 1955. (Retrospectives of the show sometimes suggest Davis did the show as much to help secure her daughter's as well as her own financial future; in a bizarre postscript, Wills, her children, and Davis's mother were all killed in a house fire a year after Davis's own death.)

But in the early 1980s, American cable television viewers were slightly surprised to see I Married Joan once again: the CBN cable network bought the old episodes and began showing them, in 1982-83, in a late-night block that included another ancient TV sitcom, Gale Storm's legendary My Little Margie. This resurrection of I Married Joan remained on the air almost as long as the show had lived in the first place. The show is now said to be seen in scattered viewings on small, localised television stations, while copies of Davis's radio work of the 1940s remain in circulation among collectors.

Sitcoms | NBC network shows | 1950s TV shows in the United States