What Was the Mr. Belvedere TV Show? The Butler Who Moved In With a Pittsburgh Family
Mr. Belvedere was an ABC sitcom about a proper English butler who takes a job with an ordinary American family in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. It premiered on March 15, 1985 as a midseason replacement and ran six seasons, closing with a two-part finale on July 1 and July 8, 1990. Christopher Hewett played Lynn Belvedere. Bob Uecker played George Owens, the sportswriter of the house. Ilene Graff played his wife Marsha, who was working her way through law school, and Rob Stone, Tracy Wells and Brice Beckham played the three Owens kids. Nearly every episode ended the same way: Belvedere alone, writing the day down in his journal.
The Setup: A Butler, a Sportswriter, and a House Outside Pittsburgh
The pilot, “Stranger in the Night,” aired March 15, 1985. Marsha Owens places an ad for a housekeeper. The ad is answered by Lynn Belvedere, a posh English butler who, among other achievements, once worked for Winston Churchill, and the rest of the series is two cultures learning to share a kitchen.
George Owens was in construction in the unaired cut of the pilot, then a sportswriter, then a sportscaster at a local television station. Marsha went from law school to practicing law. Kevin started the show as a high school senior and eventually moved out to college and his own apartment. Heather started as a freshman. Wesley, the youngest, started in elementary school and spent six seasons making Belvedere’s life difficult, which was the point. The two of them were the show’s real engine: constantly at odds, quietly attached, with Belvedere the only adult in the house who could get Wesley to sit down.
The gags repeated on purpose. George spent years trying to get initiated into a local charity club called the Happy Guys of Pittsburgh. The Owens family feuded with the Hufnagels next door, who stayed off camera for nearly the whole run (one of them, Giselle, finally turned up at Belvedere’s wedding) and whose first names otherwise all started with the letter H. Wesley’s friend Miles Knobnoster took abuse over his orthodontic headgear. Heather’s friend Angela mangled the butler’s name every time she said it. Robert Goulet turned up as himself, sang duets with Marsha, and irritated George.
The Pittsburgh setting was a choice, not an accident. Co-creators Frank Dungan and Jeff Stein pitched the show as “a very elegant, very British sophisticate hired to restore order to a chaotic household in a Pittsburgh suburb,” and they picked the city without having been there; a promotional calendar of Pittsburgh scenes, sent around to Los Angeles studios by a local media group in January 1985, later helped them find locales and story ideas. Asked why Pittsburgh, they told The Pittsburgh Press in March 1985: “it was either Pittsburgh or Paris, and Paris doesn’t have the Penguins …” The Owens house sat in a heavily fictionalized version of the real suburb of Beaver Falls.
Who Played Mr. Belvedere?
Christopher Hewett, an English actor born April 5, 1922 in Worthing, Sussex, who had been working since the early 1940s. He made his West End debut in 1943, appeared on Broadway in My Fair Lady and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and played the flamboyant theater director Roger DeBris in Mel Brooks’s The Producers in 1967. American audiences had two chances to know him before the butler: he played Captain Hook opposite Sandy Duncan’s Peter Pan on Broadway in 1979 and 1980, and he spent the final season of Fantasy Island, 1983 to 1984, as Lawrence, sidekick to Ricardo Montalban’s Mr. Roarke.
Then came the part that took over the resume. Hewett kept working after the series wrapped, with a guest spot on California Dreams in 1994 and a cameo on Fox’s Ned and Stacey in 1997. He died on August 3, 2001 at his home in Los Angeles. Three years later, in 2004, the TV Land Awards nominated him for Best Broadcast Butler, which is either a small honor or exactly the right one.
Bob Uecker Was Already Famous for Being Bad at Baseball
Casting Uecker as the dad was the show’s sharpest move. He had spent six seasons in the majors as a backup catcher with a .200 career batting average and 14 home runs, and he had turned that record into a comedy career built on telling everyone about it. He won a World Series ring with St. Louis in 1964. He became the radio voice of the Milwaukee Brewers in 1971. Johnny Carson, whose Tonight Show he ended up visiting more than 100 times, was the one who dubbed him “Mr. Baseball,” and the name stuck. He was already a familiar face from a run of Miller Lite commercials that began in the 1980s, and the Associated Press dates the start of his television acting career to 1985 and this show.
He did not quit the day job to do it. Through the run of Mr. Belvedere, Uecker kept his post as the Brewers’ play-by-play man, the same job his character kept sliding toward on screen as George moved from the sports page to a broadcast booth. Uecker stayed in that booth for 54 seasons. He was honored with the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award in 2003.
Bob Uecker died on January 16, 2025, at his home in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, a fact current as of September 5, 2026. The Brewers announced it that morning, and in a statement released through the club his family said he had been battling small cell lung cancer since early 2023.
The Rest of the Owens Family
Ilene Graff played Marsha, who spent the early seasons studying law at a kitchen table full of other people’s problems and the later ones practicing it. Rob Stone played Kevin, the oldest, whose plots ran on girls, schemes and the slow business of moving out. Tracy Wells played Heather, and the Young Artist Awards named her Best Young Actress Starring in a New Television Series for 1986. Brice Beckham played Wesley and was nominated the same year for the supporting equivalent, then again in each of the next three years alongside Wells.
A footnote for anyone watching a rerun with one eye: Kevin’s scheming best friend Carl was played by Willie Garson, who would later become Stanford Blatch on Sex and the City. He is right there in the Owens living room, a decade early.
When Shout! Factory put the early seasons on DVD in 2009, Uecker, Graff, Stone and Beckham sat for new interviews, and Graff, Stone, Wells and Beckham recorded six audio commentaries for the season three set.
Where the Character Came From: A 1947 Novel and Clifton Webb
Lynn Aloysius Belvedere did not start on television. He started in a 1947 novel called Belvedere by Gwen Davenport. Hollywood adapted it the following year as Sitting Pretty, with Clifton Webb as an arrogant genius who answers an ad to babysit three impossible kids, mainly because he is secretly writing a book about the neighborhood’s gossips. Webb earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and played the character twice more, in Mr. Belvedere Goes to College in 1949 and Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell in 1951.
Television had been trying to make the character work for decades before ABC got it right. There was a 1956 attempt with Reginald Gardiner, a 1959 attempt with Hans Conried, and a 1965 attempt with Victor Buono. All three failed. The fourth try, with Hewett and a Pittsburgh address, is the one everybody remembers.
That Theme Song
The song is called “According to Our New Arrival,” and the voice belongs to Leon Redbone, the ragtime singer known for a Panama hat, dark sunglasses and a delivery that sounded like it had wandered in off a 78. It was written by Gary Portnoy, who credits the song on his own site, with Judy Hart Angelo credited alongside him in the show’s records. If those names ring a distant bell, they should: the same pair wrote “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” for Cheers, and Portnoy sang and co-wrote the theme to Punky Brewster. Three sitcom openings that a lot of people can still hum trace back to Portnoy.
The Belvedere theme was not even written for Belvedere. It was composed in 1984 for a pilot called Help that never got picked up, and it landed on this show with a small lyric change.
The Journal at the End of Every Episode
The closer is the thing people describe when they cannot remember the title. Belvedere sits down alone at the end of the day, opens his journal, and narrates what he has just watched the Owens family put each other through, and what he made of it. It happened at the end of every episode but two across the six seasons, the exceptions being “Deportation Part 1” in season three and “The Counselor” in season four. By season three the device had migrated to the front of the show as well: the title sequence opened on the butler at his journal.
It is a small structural trick and it did a lot of work. The journal gave a broad family sitcom somewhere quiet to land, and it let the outsider in the house say the thing the family could not say to each other.
The Episode People Still Bring Up
On January 31, 1986, in season two, the show aired “Wesley’s Friend.” One of Wesley’s friends is revealed to have AIDS. The other parents panic, the boy is pulled out of school, and Wesley, scared of catching it, shuns him. That was network family television in January 1986, in a half hour with a laugh track and a butler. Not every very special episode has aged into something worth revisiting. That one did.
The Time ABC Canceled It and the Viewers Changed the Network’s Mind
Mr. Belvedere never once cracked Nielsen’s Top 30. It also never really went away, because it had a solid enough base and often won its time slot. It finished #45 for the 1985-86 season, 51st in 1986-87, 64th in 1987-88, and back up to #47 in 1988-89.
At the end of the 1986-87 season, ABC canceled it. Then the viewers pushed back. Negative viewer response pushed the network to reverse itself and order a fourth season, which debuted in October 1987. The Los Angeles Times printed a reader letter about it on Dec. 20, 1987, thanking ABC for bringing back a show the whole family could watch together, and adding: “Christopher Hewett is one of the best comedy performers on television.”
The reprieve bought three more seasons. For season six the show lost its Friday slot, the one that was turning into ABC’s TGIF block, and got moved to Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, where the rating fell to a 6.3. The last episode before the network shelved it, on December 30, 1989, ranked #70 out of 83 shows that week. ABC canceled the series for good in February 1990, then did something networks rarely bother to do: it came back and aired the two-part finale on July 1 and July 8, 1990. Eight episodes ABC had shelved eventually surfaced in syndication, which is how the show’s total lands at 117 episodes: 7 in that short first season, then 22, 22, 20, 24 and 22.
The Honest Bottom Line
Mr. Belvedere was never a hit in the way the decade’s biggest sitcoms were hits. It was something more durable and less glamorous: a competently made, warmly played, mid-tier family comedy that people watched on purpose, pushed back to save, and can still hum the opening of forty years later. It ran six seasons on the strength of a British stage actor, a baseball announcer, and a closing shot of a man writing in a book.
It also has a Primetime Emmy on the shelf, won in 1985 for Outstanding Lighting Direction (Electronic) for a Series, for the pilot episode.
If you are working through the decade’s lineup, our 80s TV shows guide has the rest of it, and the houseguest-who-will-not-leave premise got a stranger treatment the next year on ALF.
The butler kept a journal; we keep receipts, and each date on this page has one.
FAQ
What was the Mr. Belvedere TV show about?
The Mr. Belvedere TV show was an ABC sitcom about Lynn Belvedere, an English butler who answers a housekeeping ad and moves in with the Owens family in suburban Pittsburgh. George Owens is a sportswriter turned sportscaster, his wife Marsha is a law student turned lawyer, and their three kids run the household chaos the butler is hired to fix. It ran from March 15, 1985 to July 8, 1990.
Who played Mr. Belvedere?
Christopher Hewett, an English stage and screen actor born in Worthing, Sussex, in 1922. Before the sitcom he played Roger DeBris in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, Captain Hook opposite Sandy Duncan on Broadway, and Mr. Roarke’s sidekick Lawrence in the last season of Fantasy Island. He died on August 3, 2001 at his Los Angeles home.
How many seasons and episodes of Mr. Belvedere are there?
Six seasons and 117 episodes: 7 in the short 1985 first season, then 22, 22, 20, 24 and 22. ABC pulled the show off the air after the December 30, 1989 episode and canceled it in February 1990, then aired a two-part finale on July 1 and July 8, 1990. Eight shelved episodes reached viewers later in syndication.
Was Mr. Belvedere based on a movie?
It goes back further than that. The character came from Gwen Davenport’s 1947 novel Belvedere, which became the 1948 film Sitting Pretty starring Clifton Webb, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor and made two more Belvedere films. Three earlier attempts to bring the character to television, in 1956, 1959 and 1965, did not stick.
What was the Mr. Belvedere theme song?
“According to Our New Arrival,” sung by Leon Redbone and written by Judy Hart Angelo and Gary Portnoy, the team behind the Cheers theme. Portnoy also sang and co-wrote the Punky Brewster theme. The song was originally written in 1984 for a different pilot, called Help, that never got picked up.
What happened to Bob Uecker?
Uecker, who played George Owens, died on January 16, 2025, at his home in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, as of this writing on September 5, 2026. His family said through a Milwaukee Brewers statement that he had been battling small cell lung cancer since early 2023. He had called Brewers games on the radio for 54 seasons and received the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award in 2003.