Our Miss Brooks, an American situation comedy, starred Eve Arden as a sardonic high school English teacher. It began as a radio show broadcast on CBS from 1948 to 1957. When the show was adapted to television (1952-56), it became one of the medium's earliest hits.

Characters

• Connie (Constance) Brooks (Eve Arden), an English teacher at fictional Madison High School.
• Osgood Conklin (Gale Gordon), blustery, gruff, crooked and unsympathetic Madison High principal, a near-constant pain to his faculty and students. (Conklin was played by Joseph Forte in the show's first episode; Gordon succeeded him for the rest of the series' run.) Occasionally Conklin would rig competitions at the school–such as that for prom queen–so that his daughter Harriet would win.
• Walter Denton (Richard Crenna, billed at the time as Dick Crenna), a Madison High student, well-intentioned and clumsy, with a nasally high, cracking voice, often driving Miss Brooks (his self-professed favorite teacher) to school in a broken-down jalopy. Miss Brooks' references to her own usually-in-the-shop car became one of the show's running gags.
• Philip Boynton (Jeff Chandler on radio, billed sometimes under his birth name Ira Grossel); Robert Rockwell on both radio and television), Madison High biology teacher, the shy and often clueless object of Miss Brooks' affections.
• Margaret Davis (Jane Morgan), Miss Brooks' absentminded landlady, whose two trademarks are a cat named Minerva and a penchant for whipping up exotic and often inedible breakfasts.
• Harriet Conklin (Gloria McMillan), Madison High student and daughter of principal Conklin. A sometime love interest for Walter Denton, Harriet was honest and guileless with none of her father's malevolence and dishonesty.
• Stretch (Fabian) Snodgrass (Leonard Smith), dull-witted Madison High athletic star and Walter's best friend.
• Daisy Enright (Mary Jane Croft), Madison High Home Economics teacher, and a scheming professional and romantic rival to Miss Brooks.
• Jacques Monet (Gerald Mohr), a French teacher.

Radio

Our Miss Brooks was a hit on radio from the outset; within eight months of its launch as a regular series, the show landed several honors, including four for Eve Arden, who won polls in four individual publications of the time. Arden had actually been the third choice to play the title role. Harry Ackerman, at the time CBS's West Coast director of programming, wanted Shirley Booth for the part, but as he told historian Gerald Nachman many years later, he realized Booth was too focused on the underpaid downside of public school teaching at the time to have fun with the role.