I Love Lucy

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Lucy Ricardo – Lucille Ball

Ricky Ricardo – Desi Arnaz

Ethel Mertz – Vivian Vance

Fred Mertz – William Frawley

Little Ricky Ricardo – Richard Keith

Jerry, the agent – Jerry Hausner

Mrs. Mathilda Trumbull – Elizabeth Patterson

Caroline Appleby – Doris Singleton

Mrs. MacGillicuddy – Kathryn Card

Betty Ramsey – Mary Jane Croft

Ralph Ramsey – Frank Nelson

United States

Desi Arnaz | Jess Oppenheimer | Al Simon | Jack Aldworth

William Asher | James V. Kern | Marc Daniels

6

181

October 15, 1951 – May 6, 1957

The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show

“I Love Lucy” by Harold Adamson and Eliot Daniel

William Holden | Bob Hope | Orson Welles | John Wayne | Rock Hudson |

Directors Guild of America

1955 Nominated DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Television William Asher For episode "Lucy's Mother-in-Law".

Emmy Awards

1958 Nominated Emmy Best Continuing Performance (Female) in a Series by a Comedienne, Singer, Hostess, Dancer, M.C., Announcer, Narrator, Panelist, or any Person who Essentially Plays Herself Lucille Ball

1958 Nominated Emmy Best Continuing Supporting Performance by an Actor in a Dramatic or Comedy Series William Frawley

1958 Nominated Emmy Best Continuing Supporting Performance by an Actress in a Dramatic or Comedy Series Vivian Vance

1957 Nominated Emmy Best Continuing Performance by a Comedienne in a Series Lucille Ball

1957 Nominated Emmy Best Supporting Performance by an Actor William Frawley

1957 Nominated Emmy Best Supporting Performance by an Actress Vivian Vance

1956 Won Emmy Best Actress - Continuing Performance Lucille Ball

1956 Nominated Emmy Best Actor in a Supporting Role William Frawley

1956 Nominated Emmy Best Comedy Writing For episode "L.A. At Last".

1955 Nominated Emmy Best Actress Starring in a Regular Series Lucille Ball

1955 Nominated Emmy Best Situation Comedy Series

1955 Nominated Emmy Best Supporting Actor in a Regular Series William Frawley

1955 Nominated Emmy Best Supporting Actress in a Regular Series Vivian Vance

1955 Nominated Emmy Best Written Comedy Material

1954 Won Emmy Best Series Supporting Actress Vivian Vance

1954 Won Emmy Best Situation Comedy

1954 Nominated Emmy Best Female Star of Regular Series Lucille Ball

1954 Nominated Emmy Best Series Supporting Actor William Frawley

1953 Won Emmy Best Situation Comedy

1952 Nominated Emmy Best Comedy Show

TV Land Awards

2007 Won TV Land Award Fake Product You Want to Buy Vitameatavegamin.

2006 Nominated TV Land Award Favorite TV Food Long-as-the-brownstone bread.

2005 Won TV Land Award Favorite Catch Phrase "It's so tasty too!"

2005 Nominated TV Land Award Chicest Sitcom Décor The Ricardos' Hollywood digs.

2005 Nominated TV Land Award Favorite Singing Siblings Marilyn Borden Rosalyn Borden

2004 Nominated TV Land Award Favorite Cantankerous Couple William Frawley Vivian Vance

2004 Nominated TV Land Award Favorite Classic TV Dream Sequence For Fred and Ethel as a two-headed Scottish dragon.

2003 Won TV Land Award Funniest Food Fight For Lucy and the Candy Maker.

2003 Nominated TV Land Award Favorite Classic TV In-Law Kathryn Card

2003 Nominated TV Land Award Favorite Second Banana Vivian Vance

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Lucille Ball had spent three seasons on CBS radio as the female lead in the situation comedy ‘My Favorite Husband’ when she decided to give the new medium, television, a try. In her radio role as Liz Cooper, she perfected many of the mannerisms that she would use in ‘I Love Lucy’, including the scatterbrained quality and the loud crying fits when things weren’t going her way. CBS was enthusiastic about the concept of the show, but the network nabobs had two major objections – they were positive nobody would believe Desi was her husband (despite the fact that they were married in real life) and they wanted the show done live from New York, like most of the other early television comedies. Lucy was determined to use Desi and had no desire to commute from Hollywood to New York for the show. In the summer of 1950 the two of them went on tour performing before live audiences to prove that Desi was believable as her husband and early in 1951 they produced a film pilot for the series with $5,000 of their own money. The pilot convinced the CBS brass that they had something special and ‘I Love Lucy’ was given a berth on the fall schedule.

The premise of ‘I Love Lucy’ was not that much different from that of other family situation comedies on television and radio – a wacky wife making life difficult for a loving but perpetually irritated husband – but the people involved made it something very special. Lucy Ricardo was an American of Scottish ancestry (maiden name MacGillicuddy) married to a Cuban band leader. Husband Ricky was employed at the Tropicana Club and since she was constantly trying to prove to him that she could be in show business too, he spent much of his time trying to keep Lucy off the nightclub’s stage. Ricky just wanted her to be a simple housewife. Whenever he became particularly exasperated with one of her schemes, Ricky’s already broken English would degenerate into a stream of Spanish epithets. The Tropicana Club was in Manhattan and so was the Ricardo apartment, in a middle-class building in the East Sixties where their neighbors, best friends and landlords were Fred and Ethyl Mertz. Lucy’s partner in mischief was Ethel and both Ricky and Fred had to endure the foolishness perpetrated by their wives.

‘I Love Lucy’ was an immediate smash hit and during its six years in originals, never ranked lower than third in popularity among all television programs. The plots, by series creator and producer Jess Oppenheimer and writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., were superb, the gags were inventive and Lucy’s clowning the pièce de résistance that took ‘I Love Lucy’ beyond the realm of other contemporary comedies. As whacky as she was, audiences could empathize with and adore her. Watching ‘I Love Lucy’ in the early 1950s became as much a part of life as watching Milton Berle’s ‘Texaco Star Theater’ had been in the late 1940s. It was a national event when, on January 19, 1953, Lucy Ricardo gave birth to little Ricky on the air, the same night that Lucille Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV.

Over the years, within the context of the show, Ricky became more successful. He got a movie offer that prompted a cross-country trip by car, with the Mertzes, during the 1954 – 1955 season. During the 1955 – 1956 season they took a trip to Europe, also with the Mertzes and at the start of the 1956 – 1957 season Ricky opened his own club, the Ricky Ricardo Babaloo Club. He had also gotten a TV show and with his good fortune, bought a country home in Connecticut early in 1957. It was also during the 1956 – 1957 season that little Ricky was added to the regular cast. He had been played on a very occasional basis in the previous seasons by a pair of infant twins, Joseph David Mayer and Michael Lee Mayer. Also seen on an irregular basis over the years were Ricky’s agent Jerry, the Ricardos’ elderly neighbor Mrs. Trumbull, Lucy’s snooty friend Caroline Appleby and Mrs. MacGillicuddy, Lucy’s mother.

Everyone has certain favorite episodes of ‘I Love Lucy’ and there were so many memorable ones that trying to cite the best is particularly difficult. Even CBS executives had problems doing it. During the summer of 1958 there was a collection of re-runs titled ‘The Top Ten Lucy Shows’ – there were 13 episodes in that top 10. There was the show in which Lucy maneuvered her way onto Ricky’s TV show to do a health-tonic commercial and got drunk sampling the high-alcohol-content product. There was the time she tried to bake her own bread and was pinned to the far wall in her kitchen when the loaf – into which she had thrown two entire packages of yeast – was released from the oven. While looking for souvenirs to take back to New York from their trip to Hollywood, Lucy and Ethyl tried to pry loose the block of cement with John Wayne’s footprints from the front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. There was the time Lucy tried to get into Ricky’s nightclub show by impersonating a clown. When they were going to be interviewed on the TV show ‘Face to Face’ they almost got into a fight with the Mertzes’ because Ricky’s new agent wanted them to move into a classier apartment. The messiest episode, however, had to be one that was part of their trip to Europe. Lucy had been offered a minor role in a film by an Italian producer and in an effort to absorb atmosphere, ended up in a vat of un-pressed grapes fighting with a professional grape-stomper.

The success of ‘I Love Lucy’ is unparalleled in the history of television. The decision to film it rather than do it live, made it possible to have a high-quality print of each episode available for endless re-broadcasts, as opposed to the poor-quality kinescopes of live shows. The re-runs, sold to independent stations after ‘I Love Lucy’ left the network and translated into virtually every language for foreign distribution, made millions. This set the pattern for all of television. The appeal of reusable filmed programs, all started by ‘I Love Lucy’, eventually resulted in the shift of television production from New York, where it had all started, to Hollywood, where the film facilities were. ‘I Love Lucy’ was practically unique in that it was filmed before a live audience, something that did not become widespread in the situation comedy world until the 1970s and the technique of simultaneously using three cameras during the filming to allow for editing of the finished product was also a Lucy first.

By the end of the 1956 – 1957 season, despite the fact it was still the number-one program in all of television, ‘I Love Lucy’ ceased production as a weekly series. For the two years prior to the suspension of production, both Lucy and Desi had been seeking to cut down on their work load. They finally succeeded. After the fall of 1957 there was no ‘I Love Lucy’, but there were a number of ‘Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Shows’, full-hour specials about the continuing travels and tribulations of the Ricardos and the Mertzes. Re-runs of ‘I Love Lucy’ had aired during the summer of 1955 as ‘The Sunday Lucy Show’ and during the 1955 – 1956 season on Saturdays as ‘The Lucy Show’. With the original show out of production, prime-time re-runs of ‘I Love Lucy’ were aired for another two years on CBS, showed up briefly in 1961 and ran in daytime on CBS until 1967. The syndicated re-runs have been running continuously ever since and there is no end in sight.

‘I Love Lucy’ won five Emmy Awards. In 2002, it was ranked second on TV Guide's top-50 greatest shows. In 2007, it was placed on Time magazine's unranked list of the 100 best TV shows. The same year, the Washington Post named it the second best TV re-run.

When Lucy was pregnant with Little Ricky, network censors wouldn't permit her to say "pregnant." She had to say "expecting."

This was one of the first TV shows to be filmed in Hollywood, at a time when many shows were done live in New York. It pioneered the use of three cameras simultaneously, and the results were high-quality prints of a classic comedy series preserved for future TV audiences.

Ricky Ricardo: Lucy's actin' crazy.
Fred Mertz: Crazy for Lucy, or crazy for ordinary people?

Lucy Ricardo: If some other woman were to take Fred away from you, you'd be singing a different tune, too.
Ethel Mertz: Yeah, "Happy Days Are Here Again".

Ricky Ricardo: Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!

Parents need to know that this still-hilarious (and ubiquitous) 1950s comedy classic is entirely tame by contemporary standards, though some episodes do show the characters smoking or drinking. In one famous episode, Lucy gets more and more drunk as she films a commercial for Vegameatavitamin, showing alcohol consumption in a funny light. Also, old-fashioned family stereotypes (like the clueless housewife and the patronizing husband) form the basis of the show's narrative structure, and some racial stereotyping occurs, with Ricky's Cuban accent often becoming the butt of jokes. Reviewed by: Common Sense Media.

Widely considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, show in television history, I Love Lucy signaled the ascendance of the prime time TV era. The brainchild of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, I Love Lucy revolutionized the television industry with its extensive use of a live audience and the employment of multiple camera angles. The result of true comic genius, the show's ability to entertain is just as relevant today as it was fifty years ago…Reviewed by: Britt Gillette of EZine.

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