page_title: Ethel and Albert
section_title: Television
hierarchical_section_title: Ethel and Albert / Television
caption_attribution_description: English: Publicity photo of Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce from the television version of Ethel and Albert, 1954.
context_page_description: Ethel and Albert was a radio and television comedy series about a married couple, Ethel and Albert Arbuckle, living in the small town of Sandy Harbor. Created by Peg Lynch, who scripted and portrayed Ethel, the series first aired on local Minnesota radio in the early 1940s before a run on the NBC Blue Network and ABC from May 29, 1944 to August 28, 1950. It co-starred Alan Bunce as Albert.
  Radio historian Gerald Nachman called the show "insightful and realistic... a real leap forward in domestic comedy—a lighthearted, clever, well-observed, daily 15-minute show about the amiable travails of a recognizable suburban couple" which combined "the domestic comedy of a vaudeville-based era with a keen modern sensibility. Lynch made her comic points without stooping to female stereotypes, insults, running gags, funny voices or goofy plots."
  The show began as three-minute filler between a pair of Minnesota KATE station programs, then expanded to 15 minutes, and finally became a half-hour show during its last years on radio.
context_section_description: Peg Lynch brought her series to television as a continuing 15-minute segment on The Kate Smith Hour during the 1952-53 season. Lynch admitted years later that she wasn't happy with the move. "Ethel and Albert was a quiet show," she told Nachman, "and I was not a stage person who was accustomed to performing in front of an audience, as comedians are. And I always felt it spoiled my timing. I would have to hold up for the laugh."
  The radio program about peripheral vision was only one of the radio scripts that Lynch rewrote for television. The Ethel and Albert television series was launched on NBC (April 25, 1953 – December 25, 1954). It moved to CBS (June 20, 1955 – September 26, 1955) as a summer replacement for December Bride and ended its television life on ABC (October 14, 1955 – July 6, 1956).
  Scripts, kinescopes, financial documents and correspondence from the show are contained in the Peg Lynch Collection at the Knight Library at the University of Oregon. Several episodes of the television version also survive at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
caption: Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce in the television version of the show, 1954.
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