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Tuesday, May 30, 2023

YouTube Spotlight: "Meet Millie" with a young Florence Halop

Our YouTube playlist this week features, thanks to the excellent Gilmore Box account, a clip of the opening credits of 1950s CBS sitcom Meet Millie:



We included this vintage piece of TV history because the sitcom co-starred Florence Halop as titular secretary Millie's mother. Halop, born in 1923 is in her early thirties here, though obviously "playing older." She replaced the great Bea Benederet in the role when the program moved to TV from its radio beginnings. The title role changed, too, with Elena Verdugo taking the title role after MGM forced Audrey Totter to leave. One of my all-time favorites, the great Marvin Kaplan, was another regular! In the latter part of the series' run, Roland Winters (Charlie Chan in a handful of flicks) played Millie's boss.




Wikipedia says that the Paley Center has episodes in its collections, but it is hard to find material online. The clips I posted here are all I saw on YouTube. One of my favorite TV books, Harry and Wally's Favorite TV Shows, doesn't even mention it even though it ran 4 years. I'd love to see more of it. There is something charming about that promo above, and you can't go wrong with Kaplan. Make Mine Millie!

Because I may never get the chance to write about Meet Millie again, here are some photos from my personal library:




No pics of Halop, to my regret, but the top is from Prime-Time Television: A Pictorial History by Fred and Stan Goldtein, the middle pic is from How Sweet It Was by Arthur Shulman and Roger Youman (Actually, a later edition of the book under a different title), and the listing is from a TV Guide dated April 2-8, 1955.


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