Mary Kay and Johnny initially aired live on the DuMont Television Network before moving to CBS and then NBC.
[1] The March 6, 1948, issue of the trade publication Billboard gave a mostly favorable review, "This program comes close to being a model tele[vision] show.
The program was broadcast live, most of the action taking place on a set representing the New York City apartment of the title characters, a young married couple.
This decision worried the advertising executives at Anacin, who thought that they might be wasting money by sponsoring a show with a sparse audience.
[note 1][8] The fate of the NBC episodes is unknown, although they also were known to have been getting rid of their older recordings in the early 1970s and disposing the ones they could not get the stars of the shows to take.