How An Aspirin Ad Let This Sitcom Know It Was A Hit Before TV Ratings Existed

When the first-ever American sitcom "Mary Kay and Johnny" premiered in 1947, there was no way to tell exactly how many people were regularly watching. The A.C. Nielson company didn't start measuring TV ratings until the 1950-51 TV season, which made it hard for advertising companies to gauge what it was worth to put their ads in a show's commercial breaks. 

One of the sponsors for "Mary Kay and Johnny" was Anacin, which sold pills of aspirin mixed with caffeine. In 1948, the company wanted to get a better sense of how lucrative "Mary Kay and Johnny" was, so it released an ad during the show offering free pocket mirrors to the first 200 viewers who reached out. Anacin expected up to 400 letters, but it received around 9,000 instead.

By the time "Mary Kay and Johnny" wrapped up its run in 1950, TV ownership was starting to surge nationwide and advertising companies were embracing television as an exciting new medium. As popular as the show was throughout its run, it offered only a hint of the massive viewership numbers that sitcoms like "I Love Lucy" would soon garner. The best TV shows of the '60s, for instance, all easily dwarfed the '40s sitcom in popularity simply because so many more people owned a TV.

Although the show aired an estimated 300 episodes, the vast majority of them can't be watched today. Its early episodes were broadcast live and never recorded at all, while most of the recordings of later episodes were lost by the 1970s.

The result is that "Mary Kay and Johnny" never benefitted from the extended popularity later sitcoms enjoyed from syndication, and many of the TV milestones it accomplished are often credited to '50s shows like "I Love Lucy" instead. While "I Love Lucy" had its own creative breakthroughs, it is sometimes mistaken for being the first to tie an actress' real-life pregnancy in to the show; however, "Mary Kay and Johnny" beat it to the punch.

Countless sitcoms would go on to write real-life pregnancies into their shows, but few went as far as "Mary Kay and Johnny" did, turning the real Mary Kay Stearns' baby, Christopher, into a character. "For the long shots, Mary Kay used a doll, but for the close-ups, we went to film him in his bassinet," explained John Stearns, co-star and writer of the show, in a later interview with the Television Academy Foundation. Christopher Stearns was, John said, "TV's youngest actor at the age of 10 days."