I Married Joan

I Married Joan was NBC's answer to CBS' I Love Lucy. Hitting the airwaves in October 1952, it ran for 3 seasons, 98 episodes produced, before ending in March 1955. Starring Joan Davis and Jim Backus as Joan Stevens and Judge Bradley Stevens, a middle-aged childless couple. The first file is a pilot made by CBS in 1950 for a proposed show based on her radio show "Leave It To Joan". The show never got past the pilot stage. Joan Davis died suddenly at the age of 53, not too many years after I Married Joan ended. A couple years later her mother, daughter (who played her sister on I Married Joan) and grandchildren were all killed in a house fire. Jim Backus went on to be Thurston Howell III on the popular 60's sitcom Gilligan's Island. In the later episodes of I Love Lucy the Ricardo's and Mertz's move to Connecticut and I believe I once read that the set used for their Connecticut house was the same used for the Stevens' house in I Married Joan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Married_Joan