Although The Honeymooners is one of the best-remembered comedy highlights of TV's golden age, it was seen for most of its history as a segment within other programs. Oddly enough, on the few occasions when it was presented as an independent series, it was not successful. Yet practically anyone who has ever sat in front of a TV set has seen a bit of the saga of Ralph and Alice Kramden, the not-so-newlyweds living in a rundown apartment in Brooklyn. The surroundings were grimy and spartan, quite unlike the happy middle-class homes of most TV situation comedies. Ralph, a portly New York City bus driver, was one of life's colorful losers--blustery, ambitious, avaricious, and constantly searching for the one great moneymaking scheme that would make him rich. Always willing to help was his best friend Ed Norton, who lived upstairs. Norton was no better off than "Ralphie-boy" -- he worked in the city's sewers--but he was a veritable fountain of cheer and encouragement. Unfortunately Norton negated through incompetence and naivete the benefits of his blind enthusiasm, and he was a constant source of grief and aggravation to Ralph. Their schemes never worked out, usually causing friction between Ralph and his more practical wife, Alice. Ralph's reaction, whenever Alice proved him wrong or disapproved of one of his great ideas, was to threaten to belt her, with such lines as "To the moon, Alice," or "One of these days, Alice, one of these days...Pow! Right in the kisser!" But Alice understood Ralph, and in the end, at the final curtain, he would beam and admit, "Alice...you're the greatest."

The Honeymooners was first seen in 1951 as a sketch within DuMont's Cavalcade of Stars, with Pert Kelton originating the role of Alice and Art Carney as Ed Norton. When the show moved to CBS as The Jackie Gleason Show Audrey Meadows assumed the role of Alice. The Honeymooners finally became a series in its own right in 1955. Jackie Gleason wanted a respite from the rigors of a full-hour live weekly variety show and was also interested in becoming a packager of other programs. It was decided to film a full season (39 episodes) of half-hour Honeymooners shows and fill the other half of what had been Gleason's regular hour in the CBS schedule with Stage Show, a program owned by Jackie. All of The Honeymooners episodes were filmed before a live audience, two episodes per week, using an advanced filming system called the Electronicam. This was one of the first examples of live audience, single-set filmed situation comedy, so prevalent today (though it was not the first--see I Love Lucy). In 1956, with the failure of Stage Show, the less-than-anticipated response to The Honeymooners, and the strong competition from The Perry Como Show on NBC, Gleason returned to a regular variety format.

In 1966 The Honeymooners, which had only been seen on a very occasional basis since Art Carney's departure as a regular on The Jackie Gleason Show in 1957, was revived in the form of full-hour episodes of Gleason's then-current variety series. Carney was back, with Sheila MacRae and Jane Kean playing their wives. These episodes, in which the Kramdens and Nortons traveled together in addition to getting into trouble at home in New York, were done on a grander scale than the 1955-1956 series, complete with songs and production numbers. They accounted for roughly half the total output of The Jackie Gleason Show during its last four years on the air. A collection of reruns of these hour episodes was aired as another Honeymooners series in 1971. In addition, reruns of the original 39 half-hour episodes from the 1955-1956 season continue to be shown, and will probably run forever, on local stations.

Those 39 episodes got a lot of company in the 1980s when "The Lost Episodes" of The Honeymooners surfaced on Showtime's pay-cable network. The episodes weren't really lost at all. They were actually Honeymooners sketches that had aired on The Jackie Gleason Show in the 1950s. Gleason had kinescopes of the sketches and released the material to Viacom, Showtime's parent company, in 1984. Although as sketches they varied in length from a few minutes to almost a full half hour, they were edited together to produce 68 new Honeymooners half hours. After airing on Showtime in 1984 and 1985, these "new" episodes subsequently went into syndication along with the original 39.