Glenn Vance

The Goldbergs — The First Sitcom

“The Gold­bergs” was a live radio pro­gram that was even­tu­ally trans­lated for tele­vi­sion and became the first sit­com broad­cast on Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion in 1949.

It fol­lowed the lives of the Molly and Jake Gold­berg and their fam­ily as they made their way through their every­day lives in Brooky­lyn, NY. Gertrude Berg, the writer-producer behind the show, por­trayed Molly and Philip Loeb por­trayed her hus­band Jake. Also on the show were Roslyn Sil­ber and Alfred Ryder Molly and Jake’s chil­dren Ros­alie and Sammy.

Dur­ing the first sea­son on CBS, the show was the third most pop­u­lar pro­gram on the air. It was such a pop­u­lar show that per­form­ers from other fields desired to be on the show, like Jan Peerce of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera.

It went on to be the 3rd high­est rated show for CBS dur­ing that time. It even­tu­ally went from CBS to NBC to a now none-existent net­work known as the Dumont net­work where it ended its run in 1955.¹

1. Parts of this piece came from infor­ma­tion from the Inter­net Movie Data­base, Wikipedia and the always enter­tain­ing TV Party site. [↩]

26. January 2007 by Glenn Vance
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