Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel is a situation comedy old-time radio show starring two of the Marx Brothers, Groucho and Chico, and written primarily by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman.^[1][2] It was broadcast in the United States on the National Broadcasting Company's Blue Network to thirteen network affiliates in nine Eastern and Southern states.^[2] The show aired Monday nights at 7:30 p.m. beginning November 28, 1932, and ended May 22, 1933. It was the Monday night installment of the Five-Star Theater, a variety series that offered a different program each weeknight, and was sponsored by the Standard Oil Companies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana,^[3] to compete with Texaco's Fire Chief which starred Ed Wynn.^[4][5] Episodes were broadcast live from NBC's WJZ station in New York City and later from a sound stage at Radio Pictures in Los Angeles, California, before returning to WJZ for the final episodes.^[2][6]

The show depicted the misadventures of a small New York law firm, with Groucho acting as attorney Waldorf T. Flywheel (a crafty, and dishonest, lawyer), and Chico playing Flywheel's assistant Emmanuel Ravelli (a half-wit who can barely understand English, and who Flywheel uses as a fall guy). The series was titled Beagle, Shyster, and Beagle for the first three episodes, with Groucho's character initially called Waldorf T. Beagle, until a real lawyer from New York named Beagle contacted NBC and threatened a lawsuit unless it stopped using the name.^[1][7]

The show garnered respectable ratings for its early evening time slot, but did not return for a second season. The Co-Operative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB) Rating^{[n 1]} for the show was 22.1% and placed 12th in the highest rated evening programs of the 1932–33 season.^[9][10] The CAB Rating was not disappointing – popular established shows such as The Shadow and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes did not perform as well – but it was less than half the 44.8% CAB Rating of Fire Chief, which was sponsored by Standard Oil's rival Texaco and placed 3rd in the highest rated programs of the season.^[10][11]

There are twenty-six episodes of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel. Each episode was introduced by the Blue Network announcer, and featured approximately fifteen-minutes of drama, ten minutes of orchestral music between acts, and concluded with a sixty-second skit promoting Esso and Essolube, performed by Groucho and Chico as themselves. The episodes were thought not to have been recorded, as was the practice at the time,^[12] but in the 1980s twenty-five of the twenty-six scripts were discovered in the Library of Congress.^[13] Adaptations of the recovered scripts were performed before modern audiences and then broadcast, on BBC Radio 4 in the UK, between 1990 and 1993.^[14] Subsequently, a recording of the 26th episode from the original 1932-33 series was discovered, which was then broadcast by the BBC in 2005.^[15]

List of Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel (1990 radio series) episodes