My Little Margie presented 21-year-old Margie Albright, who lived with her widowed father, Vernon, in a New York City penthouse. Mr. Albright worked as an executive for the investment counseling firm Honeywell and Todd and was perpetually in fear of losing “the big account” because of Margie’s meddling. Rounding out the cast were Freddie, Margie’s “boyfriend”; elderly neighbor Mrs. Odetts; Roberta Townsend, Vern’s lady friend; George Honeywell, president of Honeywell and Todd; and Charlie, the Black elevator operator (depicted as a sad African- American stereotype, typical of TV at that time).

The program starred Gale Storm (31 years old when she began in the role), a former film actress noted for her roles in westerns playing opposite Roy Rogers. Vernon was played by Charles Farrell, formerly a highly successful leading man in silent films. The program premiered in 1952 as a last-minute summer replacement for I Love Lucy, but it proved to be so popular, landing consistently in the top five, that it was renewed for fall and ran for three seasons.

The title My Little Margie can certainly be taken in such a way as to be demeaning to women: “my” indicating the possession of someone as if she were a thing, and “little,” a somewhat inaccurate and condescending term for a 21-year-old woman. Nevertheless, it has been noted that the premise of My Little Margie was in other ways rather progressive. First, Margie was a single woman at a time when most women on television were conventionally married. Second, the Albrights were slightly different from the “normal” nuclear families then being depicted on TV. The widowed father and his daughter were frequently involved in stories designed around the two taking on and exploring roles not their own, duties and responsibilities that conventionally would have been handled by the now absent mother. Additionally, Margie, though “of marrying age,” was seldom depicted as eager to walk down the aisle. Although she had a steady boyfriend in neighbor Freddie Wilson, few sparks ever flew between them. Margie was always too busy for her own romance, usually preoccupied with launching schemes to keep gold diggers away from her single dad. Margie’s self-chosen single status and irrepressible individuality made her, in some respects, one of TV’s prefeminism feminists. Week after week, despite what her father and other men around her wanted or expected her to do, Margie did her own thing, engaging in outrageous acts and everyday rebellions, as Gloria Steinem would later refer to them.

Yet despite the presence of such advanced notions, in practice Margie rarely chose to develop them. Produced by the Hal Roach Studios, the series had access to all the studio’s haunted-house sets and breakaway props and frequently fell back on the Roach’s stock and trade—slapstick. The program got most of its mileage from Storm’s enchanting charm, her wardrobe (provided by Junior House of Milwaukee, almost always with a fetching, matching hat), and her frequently performed trademark “Margie gurgle,” a rolling of the throat it seemed only Storm could produce.

My Little Margie had absolutely no critical support. From its premier, every newspaper dismissed the show as silly. Yet it had enough fan devotion to secure a highly rated run, making it one of the first shows to survive on audience support alone. Moreover, it was the only television program to reverse the usual media history and make the jump from the small screen to the audio airwaves; an original radio version (also starring Storm and Farrell) aired for two years. The TV series’ popularity is also attested to by the fact that Margie was one of the most widely syndicated programs of the 1950s and 1960s. It even proved popular enough to air on Saturday mornings, perhaps acquainting a new and loyal audience of children with Margie’s near-cartoonish antics.