Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Life Of Riley

The Life Of Riley aired from January 1953 until August 1958 on NBC.

This family sitcom began on radio in 1943. More than any other sitcom of the 1950's it resembled All In The Family, as both shows centered around a blue-collor husband and father who frequently found life a bit too perplexing ( or as Riley put it " What a revoltin development this is!).Chester A. Riley ( William Bendix) worked in an aircraft plant in California, but viewers usually saw him at home, cheerfully disrupting life with his malapropisms and ill-timed intervention into minor problems. Riley's long-suffering wife, Peg ( Marjorie Reynolds), and their children, Babs and Junior (Lugene Sanders, Wesley Morgan), somehow saw that it always came out all right in the end. Others seen were Jim and Honeybee Gillis (Tom D'Andrea, Gloria Blondell), the Riley's next door neighbors; their son Egbert( Gregory Marshall); Riley's co-worker Otto Schmidlap (Henry Kulky); Riley's boss Hank Hawkins ( Emory Parnell); and Riley's eccentric friend Waldo Binney(Sterling Holloway) an amateur inventor. In the fall of 1955 the Gillis's were dropped from the series as Tom D'Andrea had signed to appear in a new sitcom, The Soldiers. Calvin and Belle Dudley ( George O'Hanlon, Florence Sundstrom) became the new neighbors. They in turn were dropped during the 1956-1957 season as the Gillis's returned. Babs eventually left to get married to a man named Don Marshall ( Martin Milner) and she had a baby named Chester. Meanwhile Junior went to college in Chicago. Both kids returned occasionally to visit. The show was filmed in Hollywood. Syndicated in 1977, the series was telecast on many cable stations.

For a great review of The Life Of Riley go to www.museum.tv/archives/etv/L/htmlL/lifeofriley/lifeofriley.htm