Early TV Sitcom Star And Producer Peg Lynch Dies At 98

One of the sadder aspects of television is that despite all of the streaming TV available and all of DVDs that have been sold over the past several decades, a great portion of early television history is forgotten by the modern television audience. Many people seem to think that TV comedies came into their own with I LOVE LUCY and that Lucille Ball was the actress who broke ground in the medium by owning and co-producing her own shows.

While Ball was a pioneer, there were a number of other less-remembered television groundbreakers, including Peg Lynch, who died on Friday at the age of 98 in her home in Becket, Mass. Lynch wrote nearly 11,000 radio and television scripts and was the star of ETHEL AND ALBERT, a hit radio show that became one of television's earliest successful comedies.

Like the long-running comedy THE GOLDBERGS, ETHEL AND ALBERT was a small, slice-of-life comedy set in New York City. Each week the couple struggled with the same type of challenges faced by the audience: not enough money, bickering families or throwing a party that goes horribly wrong. These shows were notable because they felt very familiar to the young television audience and their simplicity seems jarring when they're seen through a 2015 viewing lens.

Part of the reason the show resonated with viewers is that Lynch was a lot like her viewers. She had graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1937 with a degree in English and had planned to focus on her writing. Her first job was a copywriting position at radio station KATE in Albert Lea, Minnesota. But besides writing ad copy, Lynch quickly became a busy sketch writer and cranked out a weekly farm news show, a weekly sketch comedy series, a daily half-hour woman-oriented program and a variety of other commercials and sketches. It was during this period that she created "Ethyl and Albert," primarily because the station needed a program it could sell to companies hawking family-oriented products.

Within four months, Lynch was off to a station in Virginia and then Maryland, before moving to New York City in 1944. Less than a month later, the then-NBC-owned Blue Network offered her a daily national radio show.

"The Private Lives of Ethel and Albert" debuted with Richard Widmark as Albert and Lynch as Ethel. The first television episodes were simply reworked radio scripts produced in 1946 for a small television station in Schenectedy, N.Y. By then Widmark had been replaced by Alan Bunce, who remained with the show through the rest of its run. In 1950, the characters appeared on the afternoon variety series THE KATE SMITH SHOW before moving to NBC in 1953, where it aired on Saturday nights. Despite solid ratings, NBC cancelled the show in December 1955, reportedly because the wife of a sponsor thought Lynch looked like her husband's first wife and demanded that her husband cancel the show.

Luckily for Lynch, she had declined an earlier offer from NBC to buy the rights to the show, so she was able to move it to CBS and later ABC before finally going off the air in 1956. The characters returned to radio for three years and Lynch and Bunce revisited the characters for radio specials throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

The television episodes were done live and unfortunately only a handful exist. Lynch released several complete episodes earlier this year in an effort to raise money for breast cancer.

The episode below is entitled "The Ancestors" and here is Lynch's description of the program:

The original, unedited and un-enhanced 16mm kinescope from writer and creator Peg Lynch's personal ETHEL & ALBERT archive. "The Ancestors" was performed and broadcast live i.e. IN REAL TIME, on September 19, 1953 for NBC - TV in New York. It stars Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce. This episode is the legendary Margaret Hamilton's first appearance on the series, after which she became a much-loved regular. The 1950s commercials have been included here for added flavor.