“I Love Lucy” is eternal. Its six seasons and 180 episodes have been in reruns for 75 years…there’s an “all-I Love Lucy” channel on Pluto TV. The complete series has been released on VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, Paramount Plus and will certainly be available on whatever the next way of disseminating entertainment ends up being. Lucy and Bob Hope saw it coming…
But not everybody remembers the series of one-hour specials that were produced after “I Love Lucy” ended. Titled “The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show”, these one-hour episodes, which aired approximately once a month, continued the story of Lucy, Ricky, Little Ricky, and of course, the Mertzes. The emphasis was on location shooting and big name guest stars. As I did with my “Happy Days Epics” series, I will do write-ups of each of the thirteen one-hour shows. They are a fascinating piece of television history for a couple of reasons. One, they got an astonishing amount of replays over the years (more on that later). Secondly, on a less pleasant note, the end of the one-hour series coincides with the dissolving of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’ marriage. We’ll talk more about that as we get into the later episodes in the run.
Today, we’re starting with the very first “Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show”, which aired November 6, 1957 on CBS. It’s an origin story for the Ricardos, the Mertzes and a couple of other characters who play important roles in the Ricardos’ story.
As the show begins, Lucy and Ricky are welcoming newspaper columnist and goofy hat wearer Hedda Hopper, who is writing an article on how Lucy and Ricky first met.
LITTLE RICKY: How do you do, Miss Hopper? I’m not supposed to say anything about your funny hat.
HEDDA: Oh, that’s all right. Everybody makes fun of my hats. I’d be furious if they didn’t!
The Mertzes come in to spy on the Ricardos’ house guest, but they have a surprisingly small role in this story…popping up twice or thrice for brief moments. It’s not surprising when you consider the size of the guest cast.
Lucy and her friend Susie (played by Ann Sothern) are on a cruise with nary a man to be found.
SUSIE: We’re traveling on a floating YWCA.
LUCY: Brother, they weren’t kidding when they said this ship was on its maiden voyage!
Vallee plays an exaggerated (and vainglorious) version of himself, taking any moment to croon “My Time Is Your Time”. But he can’t stay still for too long because of the man-hungry cruisers.
This seems like a good moment to salute the writers. Madelyn Davis and Bob Carroll Jr. wrote for Lucy as far back as her radio series, “My Favorite Husband”. Lucy fans know that it was the radio show which led to Lucy getting a television series (and demanding that her real-life husband be her co-star). Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf joined the wriiting staff in the later years of “I Love Lucy”. The four writers were known as “Three Bobs And A Babe”. They did outstanding work in creating silly but just barely plausible situations for Lucy to tackle. One of the reasons Lucille Ball’s later TV series (“The Lucy Show”, “Here’s Lucy”) are not nearly as well-remembered is because those series tended to rely on a series of free-lance writers who ranged from decent to truly awful. As they say, “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”
At this point we are introduced to the episode’s next special guest star, Cesar Romero. He plays Ricky’s friend Carlos. Lucy and Susie are invited to hit the town with the Cubans (after a little monetary motivaiton from the cruise director).
LUCY: Who gets who?
SUSIE: I like the one with the mustache.
LUCY: So do I!
SUSIE: Well…uh…I was thinking of the other one for you…the one with the shoe button eyes.
LUCY: He is not my type.
SUSIE: Well, he’s not my type either.
LUCY: All right, call it.
SUSIE: Heads. Ahahahahaha!
LUCY: Two out of three?
SUSIE: Lucy, don’t be so fussy! You’re only going for a sightseeing tour…you’re not gonna marry the guy!
As they make their way to a nightclub, Ricky captivates Lucy with his bongo drumming…she even joins in. However, things almost go sour when the girls find out that Ricky and Carlos are, in Ricky’s parlance, “Yiggolos.” Lucy realizes that she and Susie will have to say goodbye to their fellas since their cruise is about to end. Lucy decides that they should try to get Ricky and Carlos hired by Rudy Vallee so they can all go back to America together. But an accident starts up a brawl in the nightclub…
Lucy and Susie have to stay in jail while Ricky and Carlos scamper to get their passports and credentials, and find bail money. This launches a long, and very funny, jail sequence with Lucy and Susie drinking what they think is water but is in fact rum.
Lucy, of course, is no slouch in the “drunk” act…
HEDDA: Whatever happened to your friends Susie and Carlos?
LUCY: Oh, they went together for a while and then they had a falling out.
ETHEL: They weren’t the only ones. Eh Fred? (rubs Fred’s bald head)
FRED: Very funny! Listen, if it’s good enough for Mrs. Yul Brynner, it’s good enough for you!
RANDOM NOTES:
-I mentioned earlier about the long run of these hour-long Lucy episodes. After the last episode in 1960, with guest stars Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams, CBS trotted them out for years to come. Wikipedia sez:
CBS reran these thirteen specials under the “Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour” title as prime-time summer replacements, from 1962 to 1965, with a final run in 1967. 1966–67 was the first TV season in which all first-run prime time network shows were in color. These “Lucy–Desi” repeats were the only black and white series aired that year, after which it, and I Love Lucy, went into syndication.
But wait! There’s more!
In 1987, Viacom–distributor of “I Love Lucy” in reruns–dug up the 60-minute episodes and trotted ’em out one more time. As you can see in the trade ad, they initially made a set of three two-hour specials. But they eventually offered 30-minute cut downs of the hour shows, essentially turning each hour show into a “two-parter”. I saw both versions of “We Love Lucy” on our local Fox affiliate. I have to feel that this “We Love Lucy” thing was put together after the incredible success in syndication of “The Honeymooners Lost Episodes”, distributed–like Lucy–by Viacom. Just a personal note here…the 80s were a fantastic decade for TV nostalgia. It was the decade that gave us Nick At Nite, classic TV on VHS, “Back On The Beach”, a Frankie and Annette surf movie with loads of 50’s and 60’s TV cameos…..man, those were the days.
-Ann Sothern worked with Lucille Ball again in the 1960s, playing the character of “The Countess” on several episodes of “The Lucy Show”. In one of them, the gals do the drunk bit again:
-There is one more interesting thing about this first “Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show”. With four guest stars, two or three song sequences and such, the show ran a full fifteen minutes long. CBS did not, nor does it today, offer 75-minute time slots. The show following Lucy that evening was a drama anthology “The U.S. Steel Hour”. Not the “U.S. Steel 45 Minutes”. But Desi Arnaz, who by that time had taken a hands-on role in the production and day-to-day operation of Desilu, talked to U.S. Steel and convinced them to do a 45-minute show just once. Then he convinced Ford to pay for another 15 minutes of show.
Next Time: Tallulah Bankhead is an impolite guest.