The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, an American radio and television series, was once the longest-running, live-action situation comedy on American television, having aired on ABC from 1952 to 1966 after a ten-year run on radio. Starring former bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his vocalist wife, vocalist Harriet Hilliard (she dropped her maiden name after the couple ended their music career), the show's sober, gentle humor captured a large, sustaining audience, even if it never reached the top ten in the actual ratings and later critics tended to dismiss it as fostering a slightly unrealistic picture of post-World War II American family life.
Orchestra
In the early 1930s, a booking at the Glen Island Casino landed Ozzie Nelson's orchestra national network radio exposure. After three years together with the orchestra, Ozzie and Harriet signed to appear regularly on The Baker's Broadcast (1933-1938), hosted first by Joe Penner, then by Robert L. Ripley and finally by cartoonist Feg Murray. The couple married (October 8, 1935) during this series run, and they realised working together in radio would keep them together more strongly than continuing their musical careers might have done. The Nelsons finally joined the cast of The Red Skelton Show in 1941, with Ozzie and Harriet also providing much of the show's music and the couple staying with that NBC series for three years. They also built their radio experience by guest shots (together and individually) on many top radio shows, from comedies such as The Fred Allen Show to (perhaps unusually) the mystery titan Suspense. In fact, Ozzie and Harriet's Suspense performance, a 1947 episode called "Too Little to Live On," was the last Suspense before the show expanded to an hourlong show.
Radio
When Skelton was drafted, Ozzie Nelson was prompted to create his own family situation comedy. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet launched on CBS October 8, 1944, making a mid-season switch to NBC in 1949. The final years of the radio series were on ABC (the former NBC Blue Network) from October 14, 1949, to June 18, 1954. In an arrangement that amplified the growing pains of American broadcasting, as radio "grew up" into television (as George Burns once phrased it), the Nelsons' deal with ABC gave the network itself the right to move the show to television whenever it wanted to do it---they wanted, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, to have talent in the bullpen and ready to pitch, so to say, on their own network, rather than risk it defecting to CBS (where the Nelsons began) or NBC.
Their sons, David and Ricky, did not join the cast until five years after the radio series began. The two boys felt frustrated at hearing themselves played by actors and continually requested they be allowed to portray themselves. Prior to April 1949, the role of David was played by Joel Davis (1944-45) and Tommy Bernard, and Henry Blair appeared as Ricky. Since Ricky was only nine years old when he began on the show, his enthusiasm outstripped his ability at script reading, and at least once he jumped a cue, prompting Harriet to say, "Not now, Ricky." Other cast members included John Brown as Syd "Thorny" Thornberry, Lurene Tuttle as Harriet's mother, Bea Benaderet as Gloria, Janet Waldo as Emmy Lou, and Dick Trout as Roger. Vocalists included Harriet Nelson, the King Sisters, and Ozzie Nelson. The announcers were Jack Bailey and Verne Smith. The music was by Billy May and Ozzie Nelson. The producers were Dave Elton and Ozzie Nelson. [1]
Movie
In 1952 the Nelsons starred with Rock Hudson in a feature film, Here Come the Nelsons, which among other things depicted Ozzie as an advertising executive assigned to a campaign promoting women's underwear. That was a considerable difference from the radio and later television series, which never made it clear exactly what Ozzie did for a living. Another popular radio show featuring a bandleader and his wife, the more sardonic Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, made it very clear that this was a radio-performing singing bandleader, his singing wife, and their children. But the Nelsons weren't the type to mangle the language (a la Phil Harris) or speak with tongues sharpened like steak knives (a la Harris and Faye equally). Their approach to the slightly dunderheaded husband who usually needed leveling by his level-headed but loving wife was gentler. But they captured their own sizeable audience and kept it for two decades across two media. The Harrises, whose audience was just as loyal and whose rip-roaring style should have been a natural for television, may not have even tried, ending their radio show in 1954.
Television
Early episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet found humor in family and parenting dilemmas, usually hooked around Ozzie's earnest but stumbling efforts to steer his boys the right way. As the two boys grew up, many plots focused on their love lives and aspirations. The show premiered on ABC television October 10, 1952, staying until September 3, 1966. The scenes in the show were strove for a kind of realism: the exterior shots of the Nelsons' TV home were pictures of their actual southern California home. Interiors were shot on sound-stage sets designed to recreate the Nelson family home.
Recordings
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet also made a rock and roll star out of Rick Nelson: unlike many American parents (many of whom comprised much of the show's audience), Ozzie Nelson actually liked rock and roll and encouraged his younger son's obvious talent, finally bringing it into the show itself. Rick first sang in the April 10, 1957, episode, "Rick the Drummer," singing a version of Fats Domino's hit "I'm Walkin'" and later signed a recording contract with Domino's label, Imperial Records.
Episodes after Rick himself became one of the nation's top rock and roll stars, and one of the few late-1950s hitmaking teen idols who actually had sustainable musical ability, were some of the show's best-rated episodes. It didn't hurt that Rick had a voice that sounded older than he was without sounding like a full-blown adult, or that his lead guitarist, James Burton, was one of the most respected musicians of his breed.
When David and Rick married in 1961 and 1963, their wives joined the cast, but as things turned out it wouldn't really be the same. Even with the boys growing up and the show filmed in color, Ozzie and Harriet would be locked forever, as the Museum of Broadcast Communications puts it, "in spirit and in the popular imagination denizens of the black-and-white 1950s."
Sequel
David Nelson produced a short-lived syndicated sequel (Ozzie's Girls, 1973) in which Ozzie and Harriet rented the boys' old room to two college girls, portrayed by Susan Sennett and Brenda Sykes. Following a lull that consumed most of the 1960s, Rick Nelson found an impressive new niche and comeback in music. He formed and led a well-respected band melding rock and roll and country music, the Stone Canyon Band; their classic hit single, "Garden Party," was Rick's none-too-nostalgic look back to his years as a 1950s teen rock idol, hooking around his new band's appearance at a rock and roll revival concert. The song could have been his epitaph ("You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself").
Ten years after his father's death in 1975, Rick Nelson was killed in an airplane crash (December 31, 1985) en route a New Year's Eve concert; he has since been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Harriet Nelson died in 1994. Ozzie, Harriet, and Rick have been interred together in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. David Nelson is still a producer of low-budget feature films and television commercials.