Celebrating Sixty Years of I Love Lucy

by Chuck Duncan

Sixty years ago, television history was made with the first broadcast of 'I Love Lucy.' Today we celebrate this groundbreaking sitcom and remember the laughter it's given us over the years. Here's to sixty more years!

October 15, 1951. Just another day on the calendar for most people, but for fans of classic television — and tradition sitcoms in general — history was made on this day sixty years ago when CBS aired the first episode of I Love Lucy (which was actually the third filmed episode). It’s hard to believe in this day and age how groundbreaking I Love Lucy was, but it really set the standard for those “shot before a live studio audience” sticoms that we still enjoy today (and that seem to be making a comeback after a few years of single-camera comedies).

I Love Lucy began as a radio show called My Favorite Husband, starring Lucille Ball and Richard Denning. When CBS decided to turn the radio show into a TV show, Lucy insisted on casting her husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, as her on-screen husband but CBS balked at the idea because they felt no one would believe this American woman married to a Cuban man (and his accent was problematic as well). Lucy insisted, mainly to keep Arnaz off the touring circuit and away from temptation, so they put together their own road show version of the show, gauged audience reaction, put their own money into producing a pilot, and sold CBS on the idea. That’s enough in itself to make the show a vital part of TV history, but then they retained ownership of the show, built a studio with bleachers for an audience, and Arnaz basically developed the three-camera process to shoot the show … and he insisted that it be shot on film instead of the Kinescopes that were routine at the time. Thanks to Arnaz, we are still able to enjoy the show just as it was seen on television sixty years ago, and recent efforts to clean up and restore the original film elements for DVD release have given the show a sheen that makes it look even better than it did sixty years ago.

I can’t add anything new to all of the well-deserved praise that’s been given to Ball and Arnaz, but we can’t overlook their casting genius either. Who can imagine anyone else but Vivan Vance and William Frawley as the Ricardos’ best friends and landlords Fred and Ethel Mertz? Well, it very easily could have been Bea Benaderet and Gale Gordon in the roles, but Gordon was tied up with another sitcom, Our Miss Brooks, and Benaderet was cast as Gracie Allen’s friend and neighbor on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Desi insisted on Frawley against the advice of just about everyone, but he couldn’t have made a better choice. Casting Ethel was almost as intense as the casting for Scarlett O’Hara, trying to find the perfect comic foil for Lucy, and it wasn’t until Desi and the producers took in a play one night that they discovered Vivian Vance. They brought her to the studio to meet Lucy and the two clicked, and while Vance had reservations about “lowering herself” to do television, she was finally convinced to take the part, never thinking the show would go beyond a season.

Lucy and Ethel’s antics became legendary and pretty much anytime you see a movie or TV comedy with two female characters getting into trouble (think Laverne & Shirley), you can probably look back at I Love Lucy to find the seeds of those ideas. Everyone has their favorite situations that caused Lucy some trouble and it’s hard to pick one favorite, but here are a few of my personal favorites:

Lucy Does a TV Commercial — this is probably my all-time favorite as Lucy thinks she’s advertising a health tonic without realizing it’s more booze than vitamins. Nobody does tipsy as well as Lucy, and the script she has to follow is hilarously twisted by her inebriation: “Do you pop out at parties? Are you unpoopular? [pause] Well are you?” Comedy gold.
The Candy Factory — this is the general favorite amongst fans as Lucy and Ethel take a job wrapping candy. Or tries to wrap candy.
The Séance — Lucy has to help Ricky convince a theatrical producer to hire him for a new show, and learning he’s into numerology and horoscopes, they hold a séance for him to contact his wife. Ethel gets to take center stage as Madame Mertzola, the medium tasked with contacting Tilly … who turns out to be a cocker spaniel. The “supernatural” hijinks are hilarious and Vance gets to deliver one of my favorite lines, “Ethel to Tilly … Ethel to Tilly”, unaware that she’s trying to contact a dog.
In “Lucy is Envious,” Lucy make a pledge for “Five,” not knowing it was actually $500, so she and Ethel take a job to promote a new movie, Women From Mars, in which they dress as Martians and totally freak out visitors at the top of the Empire State Building. The outfits and the Martian language is hilarious.
“Lucy is Enceinte” — they couldn’t say the word ‘pregnant’ on television, much less show Lucy and Ricky sleeping in the same bed, so Lucy being with child (mirroring Ball’s real life condition) was another groundbreaking moment for television. There had never been a real pregnant woman shown on TV before that time! When Lucy learns that she is expecting, her efforts to tell Ricky are derailed throughout the episode, so she books a table at his nightclub and secretly requests he sing the song “We’re Having a Baby.” As Ricky goes from couple to couple trying to determine who he’s singing to, he finally spots Lucy in the audience and realizes it’s they who are expecting. It’s definitely one of the series’ most heartfelt moments, you can see the real joy on their faces, and the final moments never fail to make me tear up.

Of course there are many, many more memorable moments that happened over the course of I Love Lucy‘s six regular seasons (and the thirteen additional one-hour episodes that followed over the next three years) — Lucy locked in a freezer, the trip to Hollywood, the trip to Europe, moving to Connecticut — to list here, and you can’t deny that I Love Lucy is a classic in every sense of the word. So on the occasion of its 60th anniversary, I had to honor my favorite TV show of all time and the people who made it what it was (including the show’s amazing writers) and what it still is to this day, and what it will still be in another sixty years. Cheers and thanks for all the years of laughter.

What’s your favorite I Love Lucy moment? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!