The Lucy Show is an American sitcom that aired on CBS from 1962 to 1968. It was Lucille Ball's follow-up to I Love Lucy. A significant change in cast and premise for the fourth season (1965–1966) divides the program into two distinct eras; aside from Ball, only Gale Gordon, who joined the program for its second season, remained. For the first three seasons, Vivian Vance was the co-star.
The earliest scripts were titled The Lucille Ball Show; but, when that title was rejected by CBS, producers thought of calling the show This Is Lucy or The New Adventures of Lucy, before deciding on the title The Lucy Show. Ball won consecutive Emmy Awards as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the series' final two seasons, 1966–67 and 1967–68.
Creation
In 1960, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz divorced, and the final episode of The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour aired (using the I Love Lucy format). Later that year, Ball moved to New York to try the Broadway stage in an unsuccessful musical, Wildcat. During the show's run, Ball was plagued by illness and fatigue and in early 1961, the show closed when she collapsed on stage from total exhaustion. Later that year, she married for the second time, to comedian Gary Morton.
Ball returned to television in the spring of 1962, when she teamed with Henry Fonda in The Good Years, a TV special on CBS. She adamantly refused to return to weekly television, as she was convinced she could never top the success of I Love Lucy.
At that time, Desilu Productions was struggling. In the spring of 1961, four of the studio's situation comedies were cancelled: The Ann Sothern Show; Angel, a sitcom starring Marshall Thompson and French actress Annie Farge; Harrigan and Son, starring Pat O'Brien and Roger Perry; and Guestward, Ho!, starring Joanne Dru and Mark Miller. In the spring of 1962, after a two-year run, the comedy series Pete and Gladys (a spin-off of the popular Desilu sitcom December Bride) was canceled. It starred Harry Morgan and Cara Williams in the title roles. At that time, the red-headed Williams, who had been promoted as the next Lucille Ball, had just received an Emmy nomination as Best Actress in a Comedy Series for her role on the show. That left Desilu with only one hit series, The Untouchables.
Arnaz, as president of Desilu, offered Ball an opportunity to return to television in a weekly sitcom. At that time, CBS executives were somewhat dubious as to whether Ball could carry a show without Arnaz, and whether she could follow such a landmark series as I Love Lucy. It was "never intended for this program to go beyond a single season."Fidelman, p.147. This arrangement was "meant to be a stop-gap measure for the beleaguered studio" and that through the sale of this series, Desilu was able to "force the CBS network to invest in and air other upcoming Desilu products." It was a strategy that Ball would use in the future to take control of The Lucy Shows renewal from CBS. With Arnaz's encouragement and persuasion, Ball agreed to do the show, provided that it would be shown on Monday nights (the night on which I Love Lucy had aired), and that she would be reunited with Vivian Vance and her writers from I Love Lucy. CBS agreed to a full season of episodes without a pilot, and The Lucy Show premiered on Monday, October 1, 1962, at 8:30 p.m.
Premise The original premise of the series was that widow Lucy Carmichael lives in the fictional town of Danfield, New York with her teenage daughter Chris and younger son Jerry, with her divorced friend Vivian "Viv" Bagley and Bagley's young son Sherman as tenants. Early episodes included their next-door neighbor, Harry Connors. Lucy's late husband left her a substantial trust fund, managed by a local banker (originally recurring character Mr. Barnsdahl, and later regular character Mr. Mooney); Lucy would frequently try to persuade the bank to let her raid the fund for various purchases or harebrained projects. Lucy also took on various jobs to boost her finances. Lucy, Viv, and Chris all dated regularly, yielding additional fodder for plots; in early episodes, Viv had a regular boyfriend, Eddie Collins.
In 1965, the show was extensively retooled for its fourth season. Lucy moves to Los Angeles to be closer to Chris, who was attending college in California (but no longer appeared on the show), and enrolls Jerry in a military boarding school there (facilitating him also being written out). Viv, now remarried as Vivian Bunson, remains in Danfield with Sherman, but visits Lucy a few times; Lucy's new best friend is Mary Jane Lewis. Lucy finds that Mr. Mooney has been transferred to the Los Angeles branch of the bank, and she eventually becomes his employee there. The new setting provided ample opportunity for celebrities to appear as themselves, often becoming entangled in Lucy's zany schemes. References to Lucy's children and her trust fund were eventually dropped, and this remained the show's premise through the sixth and final season.
Production The show began with Lucille Ball as Lucy Carmichael, a widow with two children, Chris (Candy Moore) and Jerry (Jimmy Garrett), living in the fictional town of Danfield, New York, sharing her home with divorced friend Vivian Bagley (Vance) and her son, Sherman (Ralph Hart). In order to get Vance to commit to the series, Arnaz acquiesced to her demands for an increase in salary, co-star billing, a more attractive wardrobe - though it remained somewhat dowdy - and, finally, that her character's name be Vivian. After doing I Love Lucy, she was still being referred to as Ethel Mertz by people on the street, much to her annoyance.
Although the book on which the show was based, Irene Kampen's Life Without George, centered on two divorcées living together in the same house raising their children, it was decided early on that the Lucy Carmichael character should instead be a widow. The consensus was that fans would be offended by a Lucy who was divorced, despite the fact that this was a new character and Ball herself was divorced. The character of Vivian Bagley became the first divorced woman on primetime television.
In the show's original format, Lucy had been left with a substantial trust fund by her late husband, which was managed during the first season by local banker Mr. Barnsdahl (Charles Lane). Comedian Dick Martin, working solo from his longtime partner Dan Rowan, was cast in ten episodes as Lucy's next-door neighbor and frequent boyfriend, Harry Connors, during the show's first season. Character actor Don Briggs was also featured in six episodes as Viv's beau, Eddie Collins, and Tom Lowell, a young actor seen on various primetime television shows, appeared in three installments as Chris Carmichael's boyfriend, Alan Harper. The first season of The Lucy Show fully utilized the talents of Bob Carroll Jr., Madelyn Martin, Bob Schiller, and Bob Weiskopf (four of the five original writers of I Love Lucy) in creating its thirty episodes, with Desi Arnaz as executive producer for fifteen of those shows. At the end of its first season, The Lucy Show received highly positive reviews from the critics and ranked #5 in the Nielsen seasonal ratings. Ball was nominated for an Emmy Award as Best Actress in a Series, but lost to Shirley Booth for the NBC comedy hit Hazel. On the strength of its high ratings, the series was renewed for a second year, but a number of significant changes were made.
At the beginning of the 1962–63 season, Desi Arnaz resigned as head of Desilu and as the executive producer of The Lucy Show. Ball took over as president of the studio and Elliott Lewis replaced Arnaz as executive producer of Ball's series. Dick Martin, Don Briggs, Tom Lowell, and Charles Lane left the show. The characters of Harry Connors and Alan Harper were never mentioned again. Briggs would make one more appearance as Eddie Collins in the episode "Lucy Goes Duck Hunting". The Barnsdahl character was replaced by Theodore J. Mooney, played by Gale Gordon, who would remain with the series for the remainder of its run, surviving another format change. In the episode "Lucy Gets Locked in the Vault", Gordon's character is introduced when Lucy discovers that Mr. Barnsdahl has been transferred to another bank and that the management of her trust fund has been taken over by a new banker. The name "Theodore J. Mooney" had been used earlier by the actor George Cisar, who was cast as a police sergeant on thirty-one episodes of Gordon's other CBS sitcom, Dennis the Menace.
Gordon had worked with Ball as far back as 1938 on the CBS radio program The Wonder Show and later worked with her on another radio show, My Favorite Husband. When CBS retooled My Favorite Husband for television as I Love Lucy, Gordon was offered the role of Fred Mertz, but he was already committed to the radio series Our Miss Brooks (which also was about to move to television) so William Frawley was cast in the part. In 1952, Gordon guest starred on the first season of I Love Lucy as Ricky Ricardo's boss at the Tropicana, Alvin Littlefield. Six years later, Gordon became a regular on the short-lived NBC-TV sitcom Sally which starred actress Joan Caulfield (who inherited Lucille Ball's role as Liz Cooper when My Favorite Husband was directly adapted to television in 1953). In the late fall of 1958, Gordon guest-starred as a judge in the hour-long The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour episode "Lucy Makes Room for Danny". From 1960 to 1962, he had recurring roles on two CBS-TV sitcoms – The Danny Thomas Show and Pete and Gladys. Gordon was to have joined The Lucy Show at its premiere in the fall of 1962, but he was still contractually obligated to Dennis the Menace, in which he had replaced Joseph Kearns, who had unexpectedly died earlier in the year. It was later revealed that Ball had grown unhappy with Charles Lane because of his difficulty remembering his lines in front of the studio audience and was eager to have Gordon join the cast.Fidelman, p. 156. Writer Bob Schiller talks about Charles Lane. Lane then became a semi-regular on the CBS-TV sitcom Petticoat Junction as Homer Bedloe.
During the first two seasons, a few guest stars were brought in for some episodes such as Broadway superstar Ethel Merman, actor-comedian Wally Cox, singer Roberta Sherwood, and golf pros Jimmy Demaret and Bo Wininger. Character actor-comedian Hans Conried, who was a semi-regular on The Danny Thomas Show playing Uncle Tonoose, appeared on two episodes of The Lucy Show in 1963 ("Lucy's Barbershop Quartet" and "Lucy Plays Cleopatra") playing Dr. Gitterman, a voice teacher. At this time, Ball also used many other well-known character actors in featured parts such as Carole Cook, Mary Wickes, Roscoe Karns, John McGiver, William Schallert, John Carradine, Robert Alda, Majel Barrett, Karen Norris, Dorothy Konrad, Lou Krugman, Stafford Repp, Ellen Corby, Philip Carey, Carl Benton Reid, Lyle Talbot, Leon Ames, Jackie Coogan, Kathleen Freeman, Keith Andes (who was Ball's leading man in the Broadway musical Wildcat), William Windom, Vito Scotti. Robert Rockwell, Frank Aletter, Reta Shaw, Murvyn Vye, Hazel Pierce, J. Pat O'Malley, Roland Winters, Sandra Gould, Cesare Danova, Bobs Watson, Nancy Kulp, future Academy Award-winning actor Jack Albertson, and the so-called "Queen of the Hollywood Extras" Bess Flowers. In addition, young performers like Don Grady, Tina Cole, Barry Livingston, Eddie Applegate, Stephen Talbot, Lee Aaker, Eddie Hodges, and future Academy Award-nominee Michael J. Pollard and Ball's two children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., made appearances on the program. In the second season, Ball's second husband Gary Morton made his acting debut on The Lucy Show.