Here’s one for Valentine’s Day: This television series was the first to feature a married couple who actually shared the same bed.

Yea! Three cheers for reader Bill!

According to the usually reliable Snopes (and I’ve confirmed it a couple of other places), it was Mary Kay and Johnny , which aired from 1947 to 1950, first on Dumont, then NBC, then CBS. It is also credited with being TV’s first sitcom.

The problem is, very few of us have ever even seen the show, as it was live, and no Kinescopes are known to exist. For those that want to know a bit more, I’ve cached a pretty obscure old AP article here.

I got on the trail of this as a result of some other research I was doing into The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet. Reading this MBC article, I was reminded that Ozzie and Harriet (I haven’t seen the show in at least 35 years) shared a double bed. However, the same article claimed that it didn’t happen again until The Brady Bunch (1969).

But I knew that was incorrect. The Flintstones came out in 1960. And Bewitched and The Munsters in 1964. But those were all sold as exceptions to the censors, as they either weren’t live action or human characters. To my previous knowledge, the first flesh-and-blood human couple (and actually the first, if we include the qualification not married in real life) to share the same bed on TV were Oliver and Lisa Douglas in Green Acres (1965):