I
Love Lucy debuted on CBS in October 1951 and was an immediate
sensation. It spent four of its six prime-time seasons as the highest-rated
series on television and never finished lower than third place.
Eisenhower's presidential inauguration in January 1953 drew twenty-nine
million viewers, but when Lucy gave birth to Little Ricky in an
episode broadcast the next day forty-four million viewers (72% of
all U.S. homes with TV) tuned in to I Love Lucy. When it
ceased production as a weekly series in 1957, I Love Lucy
was still the number one series in the country. And its remarkable
popularity has barely waned in the subsequent decades. Since passing
into the electronic museum of reruns, I Love Lucy has become
the Mona Lisa of television, a work of art whose fame transcends
its origins and its medium.
Television in the 1950s was an insistently domestic medium, abundant
with images of marriage and family. The story of I Love Lucy's
humble origins suited the medium perfectly, because it told of how
a television program rescued a rocky marriage, bringing forth an
emotionally renewed and financially triumphant family. After a relatively
successful career in Hollywood, Lucille Ball had spent three years
with actor Richard Denning in a CBS radio sitcom, My Favorite
Husband. When CBS asked her to move into television, she agreed--but
only if her real husband, Desi Arnaz, were allowed to play her TV
husband. Arnaz, a one-time contract performer at RKO Pictures, was
a moderately successful musician and orchestra leader who specialized
in Latin pop music. His touring schedule placed a tremendous strain
on the marriage, and they wanted to be together in order to raise
a family. The network and prospective sponsors balked at the casting
of Arnaz, fearing that his Cuban accent--his ethnic identity--would
alienate television viewers. To dispel doubts, Ball and Arnaz created
a nightclub act and toured during the summer of 1950. When the show
proved to be a huge success CBS agreed to finance a pilot starring
husband and wife.
In 1951 agent Don Sharpe negotiated a contract with CBS and sponsor
Philip Morris cigarettes for Desilu, the couple's new production
company, to produce I Love Lucy. CBS and the sponsor insisted
that the program be broadcast live from New York, to take advantage
of network production facilities in what was still predominately
a live medium. For personal reasons Ball and Arnaz wanted to stay
in Hollywood, but they also wanted to take advantage of movie industry
production facilities and to ensure the long-term value of their
series by capturing it on film. Syndication of reruns had not yet
become standard procedure, but television's inevitable growth meant
that the return on serious investment in a television series was
incalculable. The network finally agreed to the couple's demands,
but as a concession asked Ball and Arnaz to pay the additional cost
of production and to accept a reduced fee for themselves. In exchange
Desilu was given one-hundred percent ownership of the series--a
provision that quickly turned Ball and Arnaz into the first millionaire
television stars.
I
Love Lucy reflected the couple's own family life in the funhouse
mirror of a sitcom premise. To this extent I Love Lucy resembled
several other vaguely autobiographical showbiz family sitcoms of
the 1950s, such as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950-58),
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66), and The
Danny Thomas Show (1953-64). Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz played
Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, a young married couple living in a converted
brownstone on the upper east side of Manhattan. Ricky is the orchestra
leader for the Tropicana nightclub; Lucy is a frustrated housewife
who longs to escape the confinement of her domestic role and participate
in a larger public world, preferably to join Ricky in show business.
They were joined by Vivian Vance and William Frawley, who played
Ethel and Fred Mertz, former vaudeville performers who are the Ricardos'
landlords.
Conflicts
inevitably arise when Lucy's fervent desire to be more than a housewife
run up against Ricky's equally passionate belief that such ambitions
in a woman are unseemly. This dynamic is established in the pilot
episode--when Lucy disguises herself as a clown in order to sneak
into Ricky's nightclub act--and continues throughout the entire
series. In episode after episode Lucy rebels against the confinements
of domestic life for women, the dull routines of cooking and housework,
the petty humiliation of a wife's financial dependence, the straightjacket
of demure femininity. Her acts of rebellion--taking a job, performing
at the club, concocting a money-making scheme, or simply plotting
to fool Ricky--are meant to expose the absurd restrictions placed
on women in a male-dominated society. Yet her rebellion is forever
thwarted. By entering the public sphere she inevitably makes a spectacular
mess of things and is almost inevitably forced to retreat, to return
to the status quo of domestic life that will begin the next episode.
It is possible to see I Love Lucy as a conservative comedy
in which each episode teaches Lucy not to question the social order.
In a series that corresponded roughly to their real lives, it is
notable that Desi played a character very much like himself, while
Lucy had to sublimate her professional identity as a performer and
pretend to be a mere housewife. The casting decision seems to mirror
the dynamic of the series; both Lucy Ricardo and Lucille Ball are
domesticated, shoehorned into an inappropriate and confining role.
But this apparent act of suppression actually gives the series its
manic and liberating energy. In being asked to play a proper housewife,
Lucille Ball was a tornado in a bottle, an irrepressible force of
nature, a rattling, whirling blast of energy just waiting to explode.
The true force of each episode lies not in the indifferent resolution,
the half-hearted return to the status quo, but in Lucy's burst of
rebellious energy that sends each episode spinning into chaos. Lucy
Ricardo's attempts at rebellion are usually sabotaged by her own
incompetence, but Lucille Ball's virtuosity as a performer perversely
undermines the narrative's explicit message, creating a tension
which cannot be resolved. Viewed from this perspective, the tranquil
status quo that begins and ends each episode is less an act of submission
than a sly joke; the chaos in between reveals the folly of ever
trying to contain Lucy.
Although
I Love Lucy displayed an almost ritualistic devotion to its
central premise, it also changed with each passing season. The first
season presented the Ricardos as a young couple adjusting to married
life and to Lucy's thwarted ambitions. The second and third seasons
brought the birth of Little Ricky and focused more often on the
couple's adjustment to being parents--particularly the question
of how motherhood would affect Lucy's ambition. The fourth season
saw Ricky courted by a Hollywood studio. The Ricardos and Mertzes
took a cross-country automobile tour and eventually landed in Hollywood,
where Lucy wreaked havoc in several hilarious encounters with celebrity
guest stars. During the fifth season the Ricardos returned to New
York, but then soon left for a European tour--a sitcom variation
of Innocents Abroad. The sixth and final season found the
Ricardos climbing the social ladder as the series shifted toward
family issues. Ricky bought the Tropicana nightclub, renaming it
Club Babalu. Little Ricky (Richard Keith) became a five-year old,
and plots began to revolve around him. Finally, the Ricardos joined
the exodus to the suburbs, abandoning New York for a country home
in Connecticut, where they were joined by the Mertzes and by new
neighbors Betty and Ralph Ramsey (Mary Jane Croft and Frank Nelson).
The
creative team behind I Love Lucy was remarkably consistent
over the years. Writers Jess Oppenheimer, Madelyn Pugh, and Bob
Carroll, Jr. had written My Favorite Husband on radio, and
they accompanied Ball to television. Oppenheimer served as the series
producer, while Pugh and Carroll were the writers. Together the
three would sketch out episode ideas--many of which were based on
scripts from the radio series. Pugh and Carroll would write the
script, and Oppenheimer would edit it before production. This pattern
continued, regular as clockwork, for four entire seasons in which
the trio wrote each and every episode--an incredible achievement
considering the pace of television production. In the fifth and
sixth seasons Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf joined as a second writing
team. Jess Oppenheimer left to take a job at NBC after the fifth
season, and Desi Arnaz, who had served as executive producer since
the beginning, stepped in to replace him as producer. While in production
as a weekly series, I Love Lucy had only three directors:
Marc Daniels (1951-52), William Asher (1952-55, 1956-57), and James
V. Kern (1955-56). Much of the quality of the series is a result
of this unusually stable production team.
The
production process was unique for filmed television. Recognizing
the economic importance of the work they produced, Arnaz and Ball
still faced the difficulty that shooting the series on film generally
meant shooting with one camera on a closed soundstage. But they
also wanted to capture the spontaneity of Ball's comic performances,
her interaction with other performers and her rapport with a live
audience. Arnaz recruited famed cinematographer Karl Freund to help
solve the problem. Freund was a respected Hollywood craftsman who
had begun his career in Germany working with directors Robert Weine
and Fritz Lang. In the United States he had a long career at MGM,
where he shot several films with Greta Garbo and won an Academy
Award in 1937 for The Good Earth. Freund adapted the live-TV aesthetic
of shooting with multiple cameras to the context of film production--a
technique already used with limited success by others in the telefilm
industry. Freund developed a system for lighting the set from above,
since it would not be possible to change the lighting during a live
performance. With three cameras running simultaneously in front
of a studio audience, I Love Lucy was able to combine the
vitality of live performances with the visual quality of film. Although
the technique was not generally used outside of Desilu until the
1970s, it is now widely used throughout the television industry.
During
the network run of I Love Lucy, Desilu became the fastest
rising production company in television by capitalizing on the success
of I Love Lucy, which earned over $1 million a year in reruns
by the mid-1950s. From this foundation Desilu branched out into
several types of production, a process of expansion that began with
an investment of $5,000 in 1951 and saw the staff grow from twelve
to eight hundred in just six years. Desilu produced series for the
networks and for syndication (December Bride, The Texan)
and contracted to shoot series for other producers (The Danny
Thomas Show). In October 1956 Desilu sold the rights to I
Love Lucy to CBS for $4.3 million. With the help of this windfall
profit, Desilu purchased RKO studios--the studio at which Ball and
Arnaz had once been under contract--for $6.15 million in January
1958. The success of I Love Lucy created one of the most prolific
and influential television production companies of the 1950s. By
1957, Arnaz, Ball, and the entire production team had grown weary
of the grinding pace of series production. Desilu ceased production
of the weekly series after completing 180 episodes. The familiar
characters stayed alive for three more seasons through thirteen
one-hour episodes, many of which appeared as installments of the
Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse (1958-1960).
-Christopher
Anderson
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CAST
Lucy
Ricardo........................................... Lucille Ball
Ricky Ricardo......................................... Desi
Arnaz Ethel Mertz ..........................................Vivian
Vance Fred Mertz....................................... William
Frawley Little Ricky (1956-1957)........................
Richard Keith Jerry ...................................................Jerry
Hausner Mrs. Trumbull .............................Elizabeth
Patterson Caroline Appleby...............................
Doris Singleton Mrs. MacGillicuddy ...............................Kathryn
Card Betty Ramsey (1957) .........................Mary Jane
Croft Ralph Ramsey (1957)........................... Frank
Nelson
PRODUCERS
Jess Oppenheimer, Desi Arnaz
PROGRAMMING
HISTORY179
Episodes
CBS
October 1951-June 1957
Monday 9:00-9:30 April 1955-October 1955 Sunday
6:00-6:30 October 1955-April 1956 Sunday
6:30-7:00 September 1957-May 1958
Wednesday 7:30-8:00 July 1958-September 1958 Monday
9:00-9:30 October 1958-May 1959 Thursday
7:30-8:00 July 1959-September 1959
Friday 8:30-9:00 September 1961 Sunday
6:30-7:00
FURTHER
READING
Anderson,
Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties.
Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Andrews, Bart. The "I Love Lucy" Book. New York: Doubleday,
1985.
Doty,
Alexander. "The Cabinet of Lucy Ricardo: Lucille Ball's Star Image."
Cinema Journal (Urbana, Illinois), 1990.
Mellencamp,
Patricia. "Situation Comedy, Feminism and Freud: Discourses of Gracie
and Lucy." In, Modleski, Tania, editor. Studies in Entertainment.
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Schatz,
Thomas. "Desilu, I Love Lucy, and the Rise of Network TV." In Thompson,
Robert J., and Gary Burns, editors. Making Television: Authorship
and the Production Process. New York: Praeger, 1990.
Spigel,
Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar
America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
See
also Arnaz, Desi;
Ball, Lucille;
Comedy, Domestic Settings; Family
on Television
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