The Honeymooners

The Honeymooners is an American television sitcom created by and starring Jackie Gleason, broadcast as a standalone series on CBS during the 1955-56 season after growing out of recurring sketches on Gleason's earlier variety show. It follows New York City bus driver Ralph Kramden, his wife Alice, and their upstairs neighbors Ed and Trixie Norton, with most episodes built around one of Ralph's ill conceived get rich quick schemes that collapses into comic disaster by the episode's end. Though it ran only a single season in this form, the show was an early example of a realistic, working class married couple on American television and became a lasting influence on the sitcom genre, directly inspiring the later animated series The Flintstones; Art Carney's performance as Norton won five Emmy Awards.