Thursday, April 2, 2026

True North

Mr. and Mrs. North comes from the early days of American TV, starting when Harry Truman was still technically president. It ran a couple of seasons and was largely forgotten after that. You can tell by watching old episodes on YouTube or Dailymotion, because they almost all have scratches and blotches. 

It still tends to be a diverting show, though. The lead characters are adapted from a then popular series of mystery novels by Richard and Frances Lockridge. The plots are fairly simple so as to fit in a half hour running time, but they're varied. Whodunits predominate, but they also did other kinds of thriller plots. Leads Richard Denning and Barbara Britton also showed a notable amount of chemistry.

2 comments:

susan said...

Not surprisingly I hadn't happened across this show before but you're right that it looks to be pretty entertaining and nostalgic too - heck, I find shows from the 1970s and 1980s nostalgic for that matter. We arrived in Canada in 1953 and got our first tv set in 1954 - ahead of a number of neighbors but after Mr. and Mrs. North was off the air.

I noticed on the wikipedia write-up that Gracie Allen and William Post had starred in a movie version of an earlier radio show. Considering the lead and the fact it's Mrs. North who solves a number of the mysteries I was happy to find it on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/mr.-and-mrs.-north-1942

I couldn't help but be reminded of the even earlier married detective couple, Dashiell Hammet's Nick and Nora Charles.

Ben said...

Yeah, it's another one of those shows that didn't last too long. One thing I read in the Wikipedia article is that NBC broadcast it at 10:30PM, when affiliates were used to having local control. That might have been a factor.

While I don't really know Post as an actor, Gracie Allen was always a funny lady. Pam North in the TV show is written as daffy and impulsive, but perceptive as well. Allen would be well-suited to that kind of characterization as well.

On TV tropes, someone wrote about the Thin Man movies "Don't try to drink every time someone onscreen drinks. You will die." Funny and probably true. Dashiell Hammett apparently based the characters on himself and Lillian Hellman.