Audrey Meadows (1922-1996)
Filed under the name Audrey · April 11, 2026
There's a particular kind of TV that plays well on a truck stop television at midnight when you're too tired to sleep and too wired to stop watching, and old sitcom reruns are exactly that category. Audrey Meadows, best remembered for playing Alice Kramden on 'The Honeymooners,' won an Emmy for a role that, from what I gather, a lot of people still consider one of the sharpest comedic performances of its era, even decades on. I've caught bits of that show in more diners and motel lobbies across this country than I could ever count, always somebody's grandfather laughing at the same jokes he's heard a hundred times. There's something honest about a show that keeps getting rerun that long after it aired — it means it earned its spot the hard way, not through marketing, just through actually being good enough that people kept choosing to watch it decade after decade. I've got mixed feelings about a lot of modern television, but I'll say this for the old stuff: when it lasts this long, it usually deserved to.