I Love Lucy (TV)

Identification Television situation comedy

Producer Desilu Productions

Date Aired from 1951 to 1957

I Love Lucy was the most successful television program during the 1950’s and, through the production standards it established, became a model for future television situation comedies.

Key Figures

• Lucille Ball (1911-1989), television producer and actor
• Desi Arnaz (1917-1986), television producer and actor

I Love Lucy began with the desire of comedian Lucille Ball to join her career with that of her husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz. Faced with the unwillingness of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and prospective sponsors to cast a non-American in a costarring role in a television sitcom, Lucy and Desi created a nightclub act and toured during the summer of 1950. The tour was a huge success, and Lucy and Desi, believing they had proven themselves, began to develop their creative comedic antics for the new medium—television. CBS reluctantly agreed to finance a pilot starring the couple as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.

The Premise

Television during the 1950’s sought to present a domestic ideal—the patriarchal family headed by the male breadwinner and kept orderly by the housewife—from which family values and appropriate behavior derived. Reflecting the home life of the Arnazes, the series featured Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, a young, struggling married couple who live in a brownstone apartment in Manhattan. He is an orchestra leader, and she is a housewife who is preoccupied with getting into show business. The zany talents of Lucille Ball seemed made to order in the premise of the series: Lucy launches endless efforts to get into the public arena and thus end her dependence upon her husband, only to be defeated by her own ineptitude and her inclination toward preposterous predicaments.

Lucy’s ill-fated attempts to rebel against the male-dominated society of the 1950’s—which always resulted with her return to the position of devoted housewife—actually served to undermine the domestic status quo. Moreover, despite the fact that Lucy’s abrasiveness and wild physical humor were countered by her role as a devoted wife, the reality that Lucy was submerging her own professional self by playing a dutiful housewife added a satiric edge to the 1950’s message of social conformity.

Within its central premise, I Love Lucy continued to enlarge its scope each season. The first year depicted the couple’s adjustment to married life, with the help of Fred and Ethel Mertz (played by William Frawley and Vivian Vance), former vaudevillians who were regulars on the show as the Ricardos’ landlords. During the second and third years, the birth of Little Ricky required Lucy and Desi to adjust to parenthood, a role that nonetheless failed to stifle Lucy’s ambitions; the fourth year saw the Ricardos and Mertzes on a tour to Hollywood; the fifth year featured a trip abroad; and the sixth and final year focused on family issues, ending with the Ricardos—and later, the Mertzes—following the 1950’s trend and moving to the suburbs in Connecticut.

The Production

Desi assembled the team of writers headed by Jess Oppenheimer and including Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr., who had been the creative team behind Lucy’s three-year CBS radio sitcom (with Richard Denning), My Favorite Husband. Drawing on scenarios from the radio program, Lucy’s routines and sketches used in the road tour, and escapades created by Lucy and Desi, the team set to work writing the first episodes and continued writing every episode for four years. In the fifth year, an additional writing team was added, and Desi took over producing after Oppenheimer took a job at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Three directors guided the show through its six years as a weekly series, and the few turnovers in personnel contributed to the consistency of the series.

Believing the series to be doomed to failure, CBS insisted that Lucy and Desi pay a larger percentage of the production costs and, in return, gave them complete ownership of the show. Lucy and Desi formed their own company, Desilu Productions, and resolved to shoot the series in film—an almost unprecedented practice in 1951, when most programs were shot live. They located a motion-picture sound stage large enough to accommodate a live audience and recruited Karl Freund, a German cinematographer and veteran of several prestigious American films, to assume control of film production. Freund devised a system for above-the-set lighting and strategically positioned three cameras in front of a live audience in order to combine the spontaneity of a live performance with the production values and relative permanency of film.

Impact

I Love Lucy debuted on Monday, October 15, 1951, to generally good reviews. The show climbed instantly to the top of the national ratings, and never ranked lower than third in popularity among all television programs. At the time of its final show, it was still the highest-rated program on television. I Love Lucy has remained enormously popular through its years of reruns.

Because of CBS’s shortsighted decision to give Lucy and Desi total ownership of the show, they became the first millionaire television stars. Desilu Productions also expanded into production of other network and syndicated series. The decision to film the program rather than produce it live enabled it to be enjoyed for decades in syndication by television viewers.

Bibliography

Barreca, Regina. They Used to Call Me Snow White . . . but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor. New York: Penguin, 1992. Explores differences between men and women with regard to their use of humor, their ideas of what is funny, and how they are perceived when telling jokes.

Horowitz, Susan. Queens of Comedy: Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, and the New Generation of Funny Women. London: Routledge, 1997. Details the impact female comedians have had on the predominantly masculine world of comedy.

Leibman, Nina C. Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Analyzes many feature film and television comedies in order to redefine them as family melodramas concerned with appropriate values and behaviors.

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Focuses on the growth of television as a national medium as opposed to popular expectations for it.