Life with The Lyons was a popular old time radio show that featured a real-life family playing themselves. It premiered on November 5, 1950 and starred Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon along with their real-life children, Richard and Barbara (who is infamous for her line, “I’ll die. I’ll just die.”). It also starred Molly Weir as Aggie MacDonald (the housekeeper) and Doris Rogers as Florrie Mainwright (the nosy neighbor) as well as their dog, Skeeter. It first appeared on the radio as “Hi, Gang!” which aired from 1940 to 1949. “Life with The Lyons” was a hit as a TV show, several movies, a play, and seven Royal Command Performances.

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Bebe Daniels was the brains behind the show, writing the script and coming up with ideas for each show by exaggerating true events that really happened to their family. The show was so close to what was going on in their real lives that when the family moved in real life, their actor counterparts moved as well; on the television show, their new house had the samey color scheme in each room as the house that they went home to each evening.

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Bebe, chief scriptwriter and genius wife, began her acting career at a young age. By the age of four she often acted in her parents’ company. Leading lady in the silent film, “Lonesome Luke,” she played opposite Harold Lloyd. She acted in almost 200 comedies with Lloyd and Snub Pollard in only a period of 4 years and did all of her own stunts. She was then discovered by Cecil B. De Mille while dancing in a restaurant and offered a great deal more money, ten times what she was previously making, to come to Paramount Studios. She met Ben Lyon in 1930 when they starred together in “Alias French Gertie.” They soon married, had a daughter and adopted a boy. Soon after, she began writing and producing the domestic sitcom, “Life with The Lyons.”