100 Favorite Shows: #8 — I Love Lucy
“I know that there’s a red-headed cuckoo in the living room.”
I introduce you now to the oldest series featured on this list. Not only has I Love Lucy been a part of the global culture since it debuted on CBS on October 15, 1951, but it has also remained one of the best comedies ever made. The most watched show in the U.S. in four of its six seasons while on the air (it ended with a series of specials known as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, concluding on May 6, 1957), I Love Lucy remains one of the most popular television shows ever made, syndicated across the world, across cable, and in color on CBS every Christmas. The premise was simple: fun hijinks and ingenious schemes hatched by Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball), her bandleader husband, Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz), and her neighbors, landlords, and best friends, Ethel (Vivian Vance) and Fred Mertz (William Frawley). Yet, every episode managed to be hysterical, sweet, and instantly classic. I Love Lucy was produced by CBS following the steady success of Ball’s time in pictures and on the radio. Originally conceived by Jess Oppenheimer, Madelyn Pugh, and Bob Carroll, Jr. as an adaptation of Lucy’s radio show, My Favorite Husband, the series transitioned to television and dropped radio lead Richard Denning in favor of Ball’s real-life husband, Arnaz, a stipulation she demanded. This innovation was one of many for Ball and Arnaz, whose true calling was always on television, but they will forever be cherished by all for their contributions to the world of comedy, the television medium, and the hearts of millions they’ve continued to capture. Almost seventy years later, we still love Lucy.
(From the hallowed halls of Desilu, this essay features spoilers for I Love Lucy.)
Lucille Ball is one of the greatest comedians of all-time and it’s not up for debate. However, at the time of I Love Lucy’s debut, it didn’t seem like this would necessarily ever be true. Ball’s career started out as an emulation of some of Hollywood’s biggest show-stoppers, like Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Ginger Rogers. She appeared in song-and-dance musicals like Top Hot, Follow the Fleet, and Dance, Girl, Dance during the 1930s and 1940s, but she never experienced mainstream, popular adoration on the same level as her contemporaries.
That’s because Lucy’s talent was not meant for the big screen. Her talent transcended Hollywood; it’s just that, at the time, no one knew it yet. No one knew that they wanted to spend every week with her, welcome her into their homes, and celebrate her as a surrogate member of their families while simultaneously becoming a part of hers. It didn’t matter if she could sing or scream or dance or tumble. Lucy had the ability to make us laugh and as soon as she made the transition to television, all bets were like bug spray: off. At a time when stars were made at the multiplexes, Lucy reached immortality on the small screen, becoming perhaps a bigger star than all the rest.
I Love Lucy was an undeniable vehicle for the talents of Ball, who was forty years old at the time of the show’s premiere, proving that the entertainment landscape finally figured out why she was long a part of the scene. She was the entertainer and comedian the world needed to turn television viable. Yes, she was enhanced by Desi Arnaz’s charming showman with impeccable line deliveries and the vital Vaudevillian Mertzes. But there’s just no I Love Lucy without Lucy. It’s hard to think of television existing as we know it today without Lucy.
In those early, formless days of weekly storytelling, I Love Lucy landed upon a formula that would become a bare bones template for many other comedies that followed. The structure of most I Love Lucy episodes saw the quartet of characters concocting some sort of scheme as a response to a bet made between couples, as a means of revenge, or simply as the embrace of a challenge posed by one of them. While Lucy rarely learned from her mistakes (and Ricky, Fred, and Ethel rarely learned not to play along, depending on who was most affected by any given scheme), it hardly mattered because the aim of I Love Lucy was to be as funny and entertaining as possible. With ingenious construction accompanying episode, the installments were endlessly joyful. It never mattered if Lucy or Ricky learned because we didn’t want them to. We wanted the fun to keep going.
In the case of an early season one episode, “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her” (also the first episode of I Love Lucy to be filmed), Lucy’s scheme comes as the result of a misunderstanding. Always the excitable personality (Lucy’s energy bounced far beyond the confines of a domestic apartment), Lucy begins the episode enthralled in a murder mystery novel. When Ricky startles her, she hurls the book out the window (later attaching it to a retrievable string) in a sign that the threat of high crime and salacious behavior has consumed her.
This prompts her to misconstrue one of Ricky’s phone calls as the confirmation of a plot have her whacked. (Ricky is actually letting go one of the dancers from his club, the Tropicana.) Immediately, this mishap puts Lucy on the defensive as she affixes pots and pans to her body and dances around the kitchen like a prizefighter, ready to defend herself against any potential aggressive advances he may show. (Ethel is similarly dramatic when she chalks Lucy up for death and anticipates her being “riddled with bullets.”)
The truth eventually does come out (not before Ricky opts to lean into Lucy’s irrational conceptions about his feelings towards her), but the structure of the episode up until this point resembles a murder mystery like the one Lucy devours. It’s as if “Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her,” if the slapstick jokes were removed, could have just as easily have been an Alfred Hitchcock feature, what with its one-room setting and Marnie-esque sense of distrust. As it is, the early installment unfolds like a play, sending the characters across one stage and relying on dialogue and turns of phrase to propel the narrative forward.
Yet, even though the episode is constrained by nature, there is still plenty of evidence for the early television innovation popularized by I Love Lucy and its production strategies. The three cameras set up to face Lucy’s apartment allow for the comedy to unfold on a wide-scale, but — unlike in theater — tiny details of extra jokes are allowed to play out for the folks at home to understand, capturing all reactions at once. We zoom in on the labels of Lucy’s two nearby bottles (one is cream cheese and one is facial cold cream) as she absentmindedly dips a cracker into both, we focus on the “poisoned” drinks as Lucy and Ricky both swap them, three decades before Wallace Shawn would do the same. It was a new way to convey bonus jokes in a medium that was still figuring itself out.
I Love Lucy was obviously highly influential for both comedy and television. Not only have so many comedies payed homage to Lucy since its initial airing (Drake & Josh, The Simpsons), but the way television was structured was altered by I Love Lucy. On the business side, Desilu Productions pioneered and popularized the saving of episode tapes for purposes of syndication and repackaging. (Still, today, I Love Lucy airs somewhere on some channel every day.) From the technical side, the three cameras were buoyed by shooting on 35mm film with fluid motion and direction between the sets of I Love Lucy, pictured below.
Narratively, I Love Lucy was also instrumental in its orchestration of intertwining plots and serialized arcs that could occasionally stretch across seasons. Not only did the Ricardos and Mertzes travel to California and to Europe, but Lucy was also pregnant for an entire arc of the show. Even the depiction of her marriage to Ricky, a Cuban man at the time of the tension-filled Cold War, was shockingly progressive for its time; it’s a testament to the power and influence of Lucy.
Due to this immense influence of I Love Lucy, it’s easy to say that it’s the greatest television show ever made because, for the most part, it was the first. I mean this in the sense that many have trouble letting go of the idea that Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player of all-time. He wasn’t the first, but he was the first household name, just like I Love Lucy. Both have legacies that have endured today and both are classic, vintage, retro, the “first.” Unlike baseball, though, comedy was not necessarily easier during the 1950s; it was just different.
Yes, I Love Lucy is old and most frequently syndicated in black and white, but aside from a few troubles of domesticity (come on, Ricky, you can make your own breakfast; you have arms), it still feels just as funny and lovable today. After all, the very theme song of I Love Lucy possessed the rarely-heard lyrics, “I love Lucy and she loves me. / We’re as happy as two can be. / Sometimes we quarrel, but then / How we love making up again.” For all the scheming and wailing and winking, Lucy and Ricky were a couple that really cared for one another.
Similarly, the friendships they maintained with Fred and Ethel were genuinely affecting and the chemistry between them has spanned decades. Whenever CBS airs “The I Love Lucy Christmas Show” each December, we’re reminded of the lengths the quartet went to in the name of making one another happy and spending the happy holiday together. (Fred and Ethel provide the Christmas tree to the Ricardos and they all dress up as Santa Claus to surprise Little Ricky (Richard Keith)).
I also think of the iconic installment, “Lucy Does a TV Commercial,” which ends with Lucy, inebriated from spoonfuls of Vitameatavegamin, dancing across the musical soundstage as Ricky croons, “El Relicario.” She’s hilarious, yes, but she’s also comforted by the presence of Ricky and completely at ease to sing and dance for the cameras, even without being called upon to do so. (Lucy even sneaks in a drunken hello to Fred and Ethel while prancing about the stage.)
This episode is an iconic, oft-praised one, but it’s for good reason. The set-up of Lucy reading the advertisement for Vitameatavegamin because she’s so desperate to be on television is funny enough, but the entire second act of the episode is ingeniously constructed. The copy alone is written so well that it just begs to be inverted and played with by Oppenheimer, Pugh, and Carroll.
“Hello friends! I’m your Vitameatavegamin girl. Are you tired, run-down, listless? Do you poop out at parties? Are you unpopular? The answer to all your problems is in this little bottle. Vitameatavegamin. Yes, Vitameatavegamin contains vitamins, meat, vegetables, and minerals. Yes, with Vitameatavegamin, you can spoon your way to health. All you do is take a great big tablespoonful after every meal. Mmm! It’s so tasty, too! Tastes just like candy! So why don’t you join all the thousands of happy peppy people and get a great, big bottle of Vitameatavegamin tomorrow! That’s Vita-meata-vegamin!”
The fact that the bottle of Vitameatavegamin is also high in alcohol allows for Lucy to begin slurring her words (“unpopular” becomes “unpoopular,” “vegetables and minerals” becomes “megetables and vinerals”), but the immaculate comic portrayal goes beyond simple linguistic transposition. The sour taste of the concoction forces Lucy’s body to cringe and her face to contort. The inebriation allows her to chuckle a hearty, natural, infectious laugh. It’s not just one of Ball’s finest performances; it’s about as perfect a stretch of physical comedy, mixed with clever writing, ever committed to screen.
The Vitameatavegamin spiel is just one famous moment of many in the annals of I Love Lucy. She gets the “gobloots” from a “boo-shoo bird,” she fails to keep up with a conveyor belt of chocolate, she is tossed around her kitchen by an endless loaf of bread. I Love Lucy helped set the vocabulary and iconography for television comedy, but in addition to Ball’s penchant for hilarity, she could also turn out a number of sweet moments. I think of her mirroring Harpo Marx and then swooning as he played music from his instrument or when she takes one last look around her apartment, emulating the sentimentality of a series finale before M*A*S*H ever popularized the notion of orchestrating one. Lucy was always ahead of the curve.
Lucy Ricardo, though? Not so much. Elsewhere on the series, Lucy was desperate to break into stardom, despite her alleged lack of talent, and position herself as an entertainer on the same level as Ricky. In “Lucy Does a TV Commercial,” her first attempt at convincing Ricky comes in the form of her and Fred (as the landlord, he “worked from home,” so was always available to join in on the schemes) removing the interior of their television and letting Lucy pretend to be on the screen.
There’s reason to be annoyed by this, if you’re Ricky (though, Lucy deserves to be indignant when he jokingly plugged in the TV and nearly exploded Lucy). However, he was solely amused by it as he toyed with the knob, remarked on the “clear picture” that was nearly “three-dimensional,” and laughed through his eventual apology to Lucy.
Even as Lucy pouts through the rest of the episode, the mocking between the couple is only ever good-natured. Lucy’s famous “ew” and her exasperated, “Oh, Ricky” are both mimicked by the bandleader. His accent turning “experience” into “‘sperience” is poked right back. They were at odds with one another, but never malicious. As such, it was always fun to be with them and mutually welcome one another into the respective living rooms.
This feeling of spending time with beloved television characters is buoyed by the serialized, multi-episode storyline surrounding Lucy’s pregnancy. It begins with an amazing, heartfelt reveal to Ricky that Lucy is, in fact, pregnant. (Arnaz reacts as if he’s hearing that his real-life wife is pregnant for the first time.) From there, it continues through Ricky’s sympathetic labor pains and, eventually, “Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” the episode in which Little Ricky is born.
There are a few subtle jokes sprinkled throughout the first act of this episode, including the surprising reaction from Fred when Ricky tells him Lucy is due any minute, “You knew it’d happen sooner or later.” However, early on, most of the humor comes in the subversion of which character is “expecting.” During this time, “pregnant” was a big no from the CBS censors and so, “expecting” was often the diction choice used in its place. Yet, in the episode when Lucy is finally done expecting, her three closest loved ones wind up being the anxious ones, leaning forward in anticipation at every flinch of Lucy’s muscles.
I Love Lucy wasn’t necessarily a laugh-a-minute comedy, as much of the humor in the first half of “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” comes in the silent performances of the four leads. However, what Lucy did excel at was setting up a massive gag laboriously and carefully, enticing the audience (which could often be ahead of Lucy and its antics, throughout all the predictable, but endlessly satisfying hijinks) until the point when they finally exploded into minutes of uproarious laughter. (Lucy dancing with Ricky and smattering the chicken eggs stuffed in her blouse against his chest in “Lucy Does the Tango” still holds the record for longest studio audience laugh in serialized television history at sixty-seven seconds.)
In the case of “Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” the gag came from Ricky, Ethel, and Fred (each of whom could be just as funny as Lucy in any installment), who wanted to practice leaving for the hospital whenever Lucy’s water broke. While they rehearse, the best-case run through is seen as Fred secures Lucy’s suitcase, Ricky grabs her coat, and Ethel phones the doctor (her calling for the operator is also indicative of the bygone era in which Lucy exists, like when Ethel thought it was absurd to go out in public sporting her “blue jeans”). It’s calmly done in a matter of seconds and the trio seems to have mastered the procedure.
All of this is undone when Lucy steps from her room and wearily remarks, “Ricky, this is it.” Immediately, the three descend into chaos with panic, collisions, and the collective shouting of “GO GET A CAB!” Before Lucy can even realize what’s happened, her clothes are strewn about on the floor, the phone is off the hook, and the three caretakers have abandoned her in the apartment. It’s a hilarious comedy of errors sequence that positions the episode as an all-time classic with these four minutes of insanity alone.
Yet, the moment is also an abundantly heartwarming one because the only reason they react with such nonsensical insanity is because they care for Lucy and they only want what’s best for her. Ricky is a loving husband and Fred and Ethel are loving godparents and that is just so special, even if their response to her water breaking left a bit to be desired. Hell, at least they weren’t like the man in the hospital waiting room (Charles Lane), who was bored at the prospect of another child.
In addition to Lucy’s pregnancy, the two aforementioned arcs of the characters traveling to Hollywood and abroad also demonstrated how ahead of its time I Love Lucy was. When the group departed for California, they were shaking up the formula at a time when I Love Lucy had been the number one most popular show on television for two consecutive seasons. To write a massive shift like this while the show was still obscenely popular was a courageous move by the creative team, but it helped to re-energize the series before anyone had the chance to realize it might soon grow stale.
After all, I Love Lucy was mostly about the four main characters with minimal guest spots in any episode. (The two best recurring characters were probably their neighbor and de facto nanny, Mrs. Trumbull (Elizabeth Patterson), and Lucy’s frenemy, Carolyn Appleby (Doris Singleton).) At over thirty episodes per season, there was only so much that could be done in the apartment and in the Tropicana. By sending the show on the road, new life came to I Love Lucy — not to mention that some of the episodes in these arcs were among the series’ best.
When Ricky’s band got booked for a European tour and Fred opted to manage them, the prospect of traveling across the Atlantic Ocean was an enticing one to any viewer because it felt like we were about to go on vacation with our family friends. By the time of the Europe trip, the arc strategy had been proven viable by the L.A. excursion, but a more globetrotting affair still proved daunting.
Not too daunting for I Love Lucy, though, as the series navigated across countries with ease, never feeling uncomfortable or in a rush. It was as confident as it was when it took place solely in New York. A dreamy episode defined their time in Scotland (also one of the earliest examples of such an episode conceit for a sitcom); an iconic, grape-stomping brawl memorialized Italy; a “piece of cheese” delighted viewers on the eventual flight home.
My favorite episode from the Europe arc, however, is “Paris at Last.” In this installment, Lucy, Ethel, and Fred are set loose on the City of Lights, equipped with money to exchange for Parisian souvenirs. However, they’re also a gullible bunch and they make for easy tourism prey for the street hustlers in France. Succinctly, a counterfeiter (Lawrence Dobkin) secures their money after promising an absurdly generous exchange rate and an artist (Shepard Menken) dupes Lucy into buying a print of a painting, rather than an actual “Charpontier” original. (Of course, they all end up buying a copy of this scam.)
The cultural dissonance in “Paris at Last” allows for a humorous exchange as Lucy unknowingly orders escargot from a French restaurant and winds up placing the tongs across her nose and asking the waiter (Maurice Marsac) for ketchup. But really, the most genius comedic set piece transpires in the Parisian jail (after Lucy was arrested for counterfeiting). Frustrated by how no one speaks English (there’s that American entitlement that Lucy touched upon even seventy years ago), Lucy eventually manages to make a linguistic chain between her and the head police officer (John Mylong).
You see, that cop spoke French, another cop (Trevor Ward) spoke French and German, a drunk in jail (Vincente Padula) spoke German and Spanish, Ricky spoke Spanish and English, and Lucy spoke English. Through their chain of translation, hilarity ensues as Lucy advocates for herself and the first cop presses her on her crime. The body language, a universal one, between each of them results in mirrored gesticulation as Ricky translates a shrug and a triumphant Lucy (electing to pay her bill in exchange for freedom) leads to the German cop smooching the French cop. It’s such a satisfying, entertaining, delightful comedic moment on I Love Lucy, but forget about how ingenious it was to conceive of it in the first place. It’s a scene that only could have occurred by transporting the show to Europe. That’s foresight like no other.
The same is true of when Ricky was cast in MGM’s upcoming “Don Juan” picture and the series moved to Hollywood via a cross-country road trip (featuring movable beds and Tennessee Ernie Ford) that eventually deposited them in the city in “L.A. at Last,” my all-time favorite I Love Lucy episode.
Smartly, the layout of the hotel room (which is manned by Bob Jellison’s Bobby the Bellboy, a television character to stan if there ever was one) is nearly identical (albeit with a flipped kitchen) to Lucy and Ricky’s New York apartment, resulting in a setting that is just as comforting for viewers who were perhaps trepidatious at the prospect of upending the formula they’d always known. Not to mention, the Hollywood arc succeeds because it’s no surprise that Lucy is obsessed with spotting movie stars, considering how obsessed she is with being famous in the first place.
Throughout the arc, we see cameos from stars like Van Johnson, Rock Hudson, Cornel Wilde, and John Wayne. However, none of them compare to Bill Holden, who appears first in “L.A. at Last” and makes the biggest impression of any of the wildly famous guest stars.
Holden is first spotted at the Brown Derby, where Lucy, Ethel, and Fred opt to dine in the hope of spotting some stars. Initially dressed like the Genie when he’s freed by Aladdin, Fred supplies the bulk of the hokey jokey moments in the restaurant as he stingily focuses on the prices while Lucy and Ethel are more preoccupied with the salads and pastries. Yet, despite referring to his wife and friend as “Johnny Jump-Ups” whenever they hear a celebrity get name-dropped and search like vultures to find them, he’s guilty of the same “sightseeing” when Ava Gardner is called and he leaps to exclaim, “Where?” (“She might be people, but she’s not like you and me,” Fred justifies.)
These acts of sightseeing are fun enough (Eve Arden, in particular, makes a fun, albeit brief, cameo), but the stakes are instantly raised as soon as Bill Holden turns up. Holden is always so game for the comedic moments demanded of him by I Love Lucy (in fact, he’s integrated so fluidly into the episode that his cameo alone made it so the guest appearances never felt like cheap ploys of stunt casting). When Lucy gawks at him, Holden mockingly stares back at her. When Ricky is ready to leave MGM, Holden offers a ride home. And when Lucy inadvertently causes him to be splattered in pie, only to see him turn up in her hotel room after Ricky invited him up, so she puts her hair up and molds a fake nose for herself, he laughs and reveals not a lick of her behavior from earlier in the day.
This act of kindness as Bill Holden keeps Lucy’s secret of mawkish behavior is endlessly charming and exactly the sort of depiction that has been popularized of Hollywood in the 1950s, at least from the perspective of its stars. His third act portrayal of a genial movie star is delightful and memorable in equal measure, perhaps leveling “L.A. at Last” to be as iconic a Holden turn as Sabrina or Sunset Boulevard. Yet, in the episode, it was clear that Ball was level with Holden, too. She was just as big a star, but it just so happened that her arrival as an A-lister on the scene in Hollywood came by way of television.
When I took notes on “L.A. at Last,” I was transported back to being a pre-teen child, eagerly and excitedly being exposed to I Love Lucy by my parents for the first time. I remember reading a chapter of Bart Andrews’ The I Love Lucy Book every school night before bed, flocking to Universal Studios’ old Lucille Ball museum whenever on vacation, and gazing up at the I Love Lucy poster that still adorns my wall to this day. To think of this episode reminds me of that time in the summer when Lucy was the special family show that we all enjoyed together in the form of a couple episodes here and there and before meals. It makes me feel happy and nostalgically timeless just to hear the title I Love Lucy.
After all, the Hollywood arc of I Love Lucy reminds me of that special summer and it reminds me of hotels and road trips and the settings I love. It reminds me of spending time with my loved ones and it reminds me of stepping foot in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, retrofitted to the 1950s glitz and glamour, or Universal Studios, with its Lucy Ricardo walkabout character. Mostly, though, it just reminds me of I Love Lucy. I love that, too.
