The Abbott and Costello Show is an American television sitcom starring the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The program premiered in syndication in the fall of 1952 and ran two seasons to the spring of 1954. Each season ran 26 episodes.
The series is considered to be among the most influential comedy programs in history. In 1998, Entertainment Weekly praised the series as one of the "100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time". In 2007, Time magazine selected it for its "The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME". Jerry Seinfeld has declared that The Abbott and Costello Show, with its overriding emphasis upon funny situations rather than life lessons, was the inspiration for his own long-running sitcom, Seinfeld.
Overview
The show was put into production in May 1951, soon after Abbott and Costello had joined the roster of rotating hosts of The Colgate Comedy Hour. It was conceived as a vehicle to bring the duo's tried-and-true burlesque routines to television in a format that the team could control, without the musical interludes or love stories that marked most of their feature films, or the limitations and unpredictability of live television. Basically, if a situation or gag was funny, the team filmed it with little regard to plot, character or continuity. As a result, the show became a valuable record of classic burlesque scenes performed by the duo.
Abbott and Costello portrayed unemployed actors sharing a small apartment in a rooming house in Los Angeles. The supporting cast included Sidney Fields as Sidney Fields, their landlord; Hillary Brooke as Hillary Brooke, their neighbor and sometime love interest for Costello; Gordon Jones as Mike the Cop, a dimwitted foil for the boys and sometime rival for Hillary; and Joe Kirk (Costello's brother-in-law) as Mr. Bacciagalupe, an Italian immigrant caricature who held a variety of jobs depending upon the requirements of the script. Joe Besser occasionally appeared as Stinky, a "little boy" dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. Bobby Barber and Joan Shawlee also appeared frequently in small roles. Several episodes featured a pet chimp named "Bingo", who was dressed exactly the same as Costello; she was later "fired" from the show after biting Costello. Brooke, Kirk and Besser did not appear in the second season.
First season shows opened with a title sequence over a montage of scenes from Abbott and Costello's early Universal films. Each episode began with a framing sequence on a stage, where the pair would share gags with the audience and occasionally a fellow cast member, and often set up the episode's plot. They would reappear halfway through the episode and discuss what had just occurred or hint at things to come. These stage portions were dropped in the second season, which followed a more traditional sitcom format. A simpler opening title sequence, without film clips or co-star credits, was also introduced.
The series did not employ a laugh track in the strictest sense; completed episodes were screened for an audience in a theater and their reactions were recorded and added to the soundtrack. In the 2021 4k restoration release, some episodes have the option to be viewed with and without an audience track.
Broadcast history
The show was not a network program when first introduced in the fall of 1952, but was sold into syndication by MCA Inc. to about 40 local stations across the country. As a result, it was broadcast on different days, at different hours, and in different episode order in different cities. In New York City, it began airing on December 5, 1952, on WCBS-TV, leading earlier reference works to erroneously presume that the show was carried nationally on the CBS network starting on that date. (WCBS broadcast the show at 10:30 pm, which was after network programming had signed off and local programming resumed.) The series had already debuted in other cities by then, including Los Angeles. Similarly, second-season episodes (1953–54) were telecast in New York on NBC's flagship station, WNBT (later WNBC-TV), but not carried on that network, either. The only time the show was broadcast on a network was when CBS repeated first-season episodes as part of its Saturday morning schedule in the 1954–55 season.
The sitcom had a long life in reruns from the late 1950s to the 1990s. In the 2010s and into the 2020s, the series has appeared on classic TV networks such as MeTV and its spinoff/sister network Decades.