Original subtitles

[narrator] The golden age of television.

I Love Lucy didn't just change American television,

it invented American television.

[narrator] Back when one screen brought everyone together.

Watching television was a family event.

[narrator] The shows that shaped us.

[man] The Brady Bunch was part of the American soul.

It's timeless.

[narrator] The familiar faces.

[man] Ralph Kramden was loved on The Honeymooners.

-Pow! Right in the kisser. -He was a presence.

[narrator] The unforgettable moments.

[Jeff Zucker] Dynasty captured the essence

of what the 1980s were about in America.

[narrator] These are their stories.

[man] Cheers is the pinnacle of how great the sitcom can be.

[narrator] This is TV We Love.

It's 1951, and Truman is president.

Working together, we hope we can prevent another world war.

[narrator] As the Korean War drags on...

and the Cold War ramps up,

at home, America's economy is booming.

All About Eve wins Best Picture...

Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.

[narrator] ...and American television is in its early days.

Well, Howdy Doody, kids!

[narrator] That is, until a fearless redhead

bursts onto our TV screens.

Lucy, I'm home.

I Love Lucy didn't just change American television,

it invented American television.

Lucy, would you mind telling me what's going on?

I Love Lucy is the classic.

It created the road map for all that was to come.

[Zucker] Very few shows have held up in the history

of American television like I Love Lucy.

Americans had never seen something

like Lucy Ricardo before.

Lucy!

[Todd S. Purdum] The thing that viewers

remember most about I Love Lucy

is Lucille Ball's sheer genius as a physical comedian.

She was so bold. She was a master.

[laughter]

Cheek, cheek, the outside of your face.

It's the first interracial marriage on TV,

which I think is kind of the big one, right?

What did he say?

What's the matter with the way I talk?

I've learned to listen with an accent.

If you can only use one television show...

Lucy Ricardo! [screams]

...to kind of represent all of American television,

I think it might have to be I Love Lucy.

[Todd Purdum] In the late 1940s, CBS approached Lucille Ball

about doing a network radio show,

a sitcom, called My Favorite Husband.

[Richard Denning] When I married Liz, she couldn't cook,

she couldn't sew, she couldn't clean.

But later she overcame this lack of domesticity

in a most ingenious manner.

[Lucille Ball] I got a maid.

[laughter]

[Purdum] The show was about a kind of zany housewife,

and it became a big hit.

It was extremely popular.

[Dana Sumner-Pritchard] CBS approaches her and says,

"We want to make a television version of My Favorite Husband."

CBS was really looking to claim this new industry.

Television at that point hadn't existed,

so it was this huge gamble.

Lucille Ball was enough of a name

that they thought, "Okay, she can translate to TV,

because we've seen her movies, we know her."

Lucy took CBS's very generous offer

and said, "That's super great.

I won't do it without my husband."

And CBS was like, "Why are you making demands on us?" [laughs]

She says, "I'm not doing it without Desi."

They said, "Well, we're not doing it with Desi."

The problem was that CBS didn't want him

to be her husband at all, because they thought

the American public would never buy the idea

of this thick-accented Cuban married to an all-American girl.

Oh, my God, it feels really bad to say.

CBS didn't want Desi because they just didn't think

that anyone would want to watch a show

with a mixed-race marriage.

It was a racist decision.

I think it was unbelievably ballsy

of Lucille Ball to do that,

especially a woman at that time,

advocating for an interracial marriage.

It would have been unheard of.

[Journey Gunderson] She risks

the entertainment deal of a lifetime.

A woman who is an actress having her own idea

and asserting herself with the heads of CBS,

risking her own success.

There is no comparable today

for just how powerful CBS was in 1950.

It really speaks to what a bold and brave woman she was.

And I cannot believe that Lucy just said,

"Okay, well, then bye," and walked out of that room.

I think that it just shows

the tremendous moxie that she had.

I think if it wouldn't have been for Lucy,

I would have stopped trying a long time ago,

because I was always the guy that didn't fit.

When she did My Favorite Husband on the radio,

they said that I wasn't the type to play the part.

[Jim Colucci] Being a refugee coming from Cuba,

Desi has an amazing life story.

His family lost everything in the Revolution of 1933.

[Gunderson] After the Batista Revolution,

he and others in his family end up penniless in Miami.

My first job in this country was cleaning bird cages.

It's very true.

We came to this country, and we didn't have a cent.

[upbeat Cuban music]

[Colucci] He reinvented himself as a self-taught musician,

and had this amazing musical talent.

And he was so handsome,

and then got scouted to Hollywood

and played the Latin lover.

♪ Oh, eh, oh, oh ♪

[Gunderson] When Desi Arnaz

meets Lucille Ball at RKO...

They were starring together in a movie called Too Many Girls.

[Sumner-Pritchard] Lucy was playing, like,

the second banana character,

and Desi was one of the-- you know, the handsome guys.

That was kind of his job, was to just be hot.

[upbeat music playing]

Lucy started out trying to be a serious actress.

She moved to LA.

She was a Goldwyn Girl and a Ziegfeld Girl.

[Purdum] She'd been a steadily working actress,

but she'd never broken through into an A-list star.

[Colucci] As a B-movie actress, people noticed she was funny.

That did happen, and she got some wisecracking roles,

but nothing that would at all give hints to what she could do.

[Sumner-Pritchard] Desi was completely smitten,

and they fell in love, married in the early '40s.

I think they were absolutely a true love story,

but it was very, very difficult, the way their careers operated.

[Purdum] He was leading his band and was constantly on the road.

They famously often only saw each other at dawn or dusk,

as he was heading off to the nightclub

and she was coming home from the studio.

[host] Lucy, you said that one of the reasons

why I Love Lucy started

was to keep you and Desi together.

It was to have a family and live a pretty normal life.

You cannot have a baby over the telephone, long distance.

I found that out.

In the face of all this reluctance,

it was really Desi who came up with an idea

to sell the show.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz

take the show on the road vaudeville style,

performing to American audiences

and proving that they would embrace them as a couple.

[Sumner-Pritchard] They performed

at a theater in New York.

It was sold out pretty much every night.

[Purdum] Indeed, this show was a boffo hit.

Critics all over the country loved it.

Audiences flocked to see it,

and ultimately CBS had to agree, "Well, maybe this would work."

Well, it doesn't matter.

You'll never be a success on television anyway.

So CBS greenlit something called a test film.

What do you mean I won't be a success on television?

You don't have a pretty girl in your act.

She was funnier than all the people he knew,

so Ricky had to let her sort of be involved,

but also she was a pain in the neck,

because he had a business to run.

...fella named Risky Riscardo?

It was very much like their vaudeville act

in which Lucy would clown around.

-Yes, give us a tune. -Right.

-And you got yourself a job. -Right.

-All right, go to it. -Right.

[Lucy screams]

She'd flop on the stage like a barking seal.

[trumpets playing]

[mimics seal barking]

The pilot is weird.

[laughs] I won't lie.

She was 40 years old

when she started playing that role on TV.

Even in today's time, that's considered

a little bit older to be the lead of a TV show.

[Sumner-Pritchard] Honestly, if you'd seen the pilot,

you wouldn't have greenlit it either.

What's interesting about the failed pilot,

it needs to be reworked,

and so it's like all of this work

to retool their whole lives to do this show

might not even happen.

What do we do now?

[upbeat music playing]

[Purdum] In those days, most television programs

were sponsored by a single advertiser.

And so they had to find a sponsor that would pay

to put the show on the air.

[Sumner-Pritchard] They probably thought,

"What company's going to sponsor a show

with a mixed-race marriage in it?"

Which is gross, but I'm just reporting.

Their major sponsor ended up being Philip Morris.

Oh, Desi, you're so good to me.

Well, honey, you deserve the best.

When Philip Morris stepped up,

that really took it off the shelf.

And Desi had all of these really advanced tech demands.

[Purdum] Video tape hadn't been invented yet.

There was no way to preserve a television signal,

which was this flickering image

that went out live over the airwaves.

[Sumner-Pritchard] Pretty much every television broadcast

before that is lost to time.

And Desi was the one who said, "Let's do it on film."

When Desi said, "Well, why don't we film it,"

CBS said, "That will cost more.

And if you do that, you're going to have to take a pay cut."

And Desi had one condition, he said,

"I want to own the negatives. I want to own the film."

[Gunderson] CBS laughs about this in the negotiation

and says to Desi,

"Who's going to want to watch them after they air?"

[Purdum] CBS couldn't really get its head around the notion

that television programs were gonna be shown more than once.

So it turned out to be an unbelievable deal.

They say, "We want to produce the show ourselves

and sell it to you,"

which flips the entertainment business model on its head.

[Purdum] It could be re-shown. So the rerun was born.

And if it could be re-shown, it could be re-sold.

So ultimately, the syndication market was born.

In a very real way, Desi's innovations also helped

draw the center of television production

from the East Coast to the West Coast,

and made Los Angeles into the center

of television production that it remains today.

Sitcoms were not shot as multi-cams.

No one really had expertise in how to light the set.

Lucille Ball kind of needed the pressure

of performing it like a play.

That doesn't work without Karl Freund.

[Purdum] Desi hired Karl Freund,

the Academy Award-winning cinematographer.

[David Daniels] Figuring out how to light the entire set

so that there were no shadows,

so all of the cameras could pick up

the movement at the same time.

[Purdum] In comedy, if you can capture

both the action and the reaction

with multiple cameras running at once,

then you completely capture the spontaneity.

Then the trick was how to get an audience

onto a motion picture sound stage,

which was basically a working factory floor

with all kinds of fire hazards and dangerous cables.

And it had never been done.

[Gunderson] Lucille Ball always said

that she was dead without an audience.

Lucy, as Desi wisely knew,

performed better in front of people.

There was pushback. How are we going to do that?

Do we fit people in here?

It was Desi who figured out that they could get

about 300 people into a sound stage.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Desi Arnaz!

[applause]

As you know, this is film,

and that's why you see all these cameras down here,

because it's just like making a movie, see?

The mother of my children, ladies and gentlemen,

she plays Lucy, Lucille Ball.

[applause]

Then the audience is there,

and you're in front of the audience,

and it's so quick and fast.

[theme music playing]

Finally, the show went on the air in October of 1951,

and it was more or less an overnight sensation.

[Sumner-Pritchard] The first episode of I Love Lucy

that premieres, the girls want to go to a nightclub.

Well, look, Lucy, Monday's Fred's anniversary,

and he wants to go to the fights.

Yeah, well, Monday's Ethel's anniversary too,

and she wants to go to a nightclub.

[Colucci] The fact that they found Vivian Vance

and William Frawley, and they were as great as they were.

I mean, Vivian had been a stage actress.

Who knew that she could go toe-to-toe with Lucy,

and that they both had the best comic timing ever?

William Frawley was often a heavy in movies.

Did we know he could be lovable as Fred?

They're great at musical comedy too.

Did we know that?

Lucy and Desi now had

two amazing counterparts.

That is a gift.

[laughter]

-Kiss me right now. -Let's get acquainted-- please!

I loved Desi Arnaz,

I loved his accent when I was a little kid.

When Ricky Ricardo would, like, get angry

and rattle off a really fast rant in Spanish.

[Desi speaking in Spanish]

He's in show business, and she wants to get into it.

He wants to keep her out of it

and keep her at home as a happy housewife,

and she is constantly scheming and dreaming

of ways to get into the act.

They've already hired another girl to do the commercial,

and they won't be needing you after all.

Goodbye.

-Now you stand right over here. -Yes, sir.

Now let's try it once, and remember,

be bright and vivacious.

-Yes, sir. -All right.

Vitameatavegamin.

Vitameatavegamin.

Vitavitamed-- Vitavitamedegin.

Vitavitave-- [laughs]

I'm not even gonna be able to say it.

Vitameatavegamin. [laughs]

It's so tasty too.

[laughter]

Vitameatavegamin.

If you watch that sequence, you cannot believe

she did that in one take, which she did.

[laughter]

This is Lucille Ball at her best.

It's just like candy.

[Robert Smigel] Vitameatavegamin, oh, my God.

That was so-- [laughs]

[hiccups] Oh.

That's the funniest drunk performance ever on television.

Alcohol 23%?

She's doing a commercial.

She's slowly, slowly, slowly getting drunker.

Well, I'm your Vita-minnie-veggie-man girl.

Do you pop out at parties?

Are you unpoopular?

The slow rise of it is just brilliant.

[laughter]

That is a lesson in comedy timing.

[audience screaming with laughter]

It changes television.

The show was already doing really, really well,

but Vitameatavegamin put it over the top.

[cheering]

[upbeat music playing]

[Colucci] It's right after World War II,

and all of a sudden, there's a boom in everything.

And so TV could boom along with it.

[Purdum] Soon enough, I Love Lucy became

the number one show on television.

[Sumner-Pritchard] That writing crew said,

"We are here, and now we're going to be here.

We've got them on the hook, and now let's reel them in."

Season two premieres with the chocolate factory.

"Job Switching" is what the episode is actually called.

Who do you think does the housework?

And who do you think cooks all the meals?

-Yeah. -Oh.

Anybody can cook and do the housework.

Ha! I'd just like to see you two try it for a week.

So they decide to switch roles in the house,

and the men stay home,

the girls go and get jobs at a chocolate factory.

Ricardo, I'm going to put you to work chocolate dipping.

You say you've had experience.

They used to call me the Big Dipper.

[laughter]

The See's candy chocolate maker

did not even know what I Love Lucy was.

Hey, this is fun!

They kind of had this history of bringing in,

like, real professionals who had no acting experience.

What do you do when your nose itches?

[Sumner-Pritchard] That's why it was so funny,

because these people were genuinely trying to do

what they were doing up against this complete clown.

[laughter]

Ricky and Fred say that, "Well, we'll make dinner."

What do you know about rice?

Well, I had it thrown at me

on one of the darkest days of my life.

He decides to make a pound of rice per person.

Hey, Ricky, watch this.

[both screaming]

Stop the rice! Hurry up, Fred.

Well, they hadn't rehearsed it with the real rice.

Desi accidentally falls.

[laughter]

And you can hear the audience in real time

with this explosive laugh.

So he arranges to fall by accident on purpose

two more times before the scene ends.

He's a ham.

[laughter]

All he had to do was be committed, and he was.

If one piece of candy gets past you

and into the packing room unwrapped,

you're fired!

[both] Yes, ma'am.

Let 'er roll!

In the last five minutes,

Lucy and Ethel get put on a conveyor belt.

-Well, this is easier. -Yeah, we can handle this okay.

We've all been underwater at work.

We've all felt like we can't keep up.

And it accesses something in us.

The first time I watched Lucy in the chocolate factory,

I just couldn't believe what I was seeing.

[laughter]

Here she comes!

It was just brilliant.

That, I think, is the standard

by which every other sitcom has come from.

Having an A story, having a B story,

having running gags.

You're doing splendidly.

Speed it up a little!

When more than a million American households

vote on the funniest scene in television,

the conveyor belt was voted

the funniest scene in television history.

[laughter]

[Sumner-Pritchard] Audiences were, like,

salivating for this show.

They were captivated.

You couldn't go anywhere

without seeing Lucy and Desi

on a magazine cover.

Everything is going very well.

Better than anyone might have even been able to dream.

The sponsors are happy, the network's happy,

the audience is happy, Lucy and Desi are happy.

Stores are changing their hours of operation

around the airing of I Love Lucy on Monday nights.

And then Lucy gets pregnant.

Lucy!

[Lucille] Is that you, sweetie pie?

And this is personally great news for them,

because they'd so much wanted children.

But CBS and Philip Morris go nuts.

[Sumner-Pritchard] It suddenly becomes,

"What does that mean for the show?

Are we going to pause the show at its highest?

Do we stop? Do we rework it?"

[Purdum] You can't have this pregnant woman on the air.

What are you going to do? Can you shoot around her?

And Desi's like, "No way, because when Lucy gets pregnant,

she really balloons."

[Sumner-Pritchard] CBS and Philip Morris

did not want Lucy Ricardo to be pregnant.

Philip Morris essentially said,

you know, "In no uncertain terms,

we're not moving forward with this show

if there's going to be a Ricardo baby.

That's not going to work for us. She can't be pregnant on TV."

They said to themselves, "Lucille Ball is pregnant.

Why can't Lucy Ricardo be pregnant?"

Lucy and Ricky could have a baby.

Okay, take it from real life.

Their number one sponsor is a cigarette company.

You know, what does that look like?

Do we just pause for a year?

The studio heads were freaking out.

The sponsors were freaking out.

So finally, Desi goes over the heads of the brass

to the chairman of Philip Morris, the sponsor,

and says, you know, "We've given you

the number one show on television.

We're now being told that we can't do this plotline.

If you don't want that, then it's okay with us,

but we'll then have to cease being responsible

for giving you the number one show on television."

And then a memo comes through from Philip Morris

that says, "Don't F with the Cuban."

Gee, I'm going to have to go on a diet.

You know, I could hardly get into my dress this morning.

Hey, Lucy, wait a minute.

You don't suppose...

That's not in the Constitution,

that you can't say "pregnant" on TV.

That was CBS's rule.

I'm telling you, being an expectant father

is pretty tough on a man.

Yeah, I know, but you got to go along with it.

You couldn't even say the word "pregnant"

-in those days. -Right.

They say I had to say "expectant."

[laughter]

It is so funny today to think that

they weren't allowed to use the word "pregnant."

Then they're so brilliant,

they make it into a joke with "'spectant."

They worked it in.

You don't suppose you're going to have a baby?

Oh, of course not. [laughs]

Once she starts showing,

they put her in very baggy shirts

so that it's not too obvious.

They had a minister, a priest, and a rabbi on set

to make sure that nothing was offensive.

It was incredibly taboo

to portray a pregnant woman on television at that time.

[Ethel] What did the doctor say?

Ethel, we're going to have a baby.

We are?

-[laughter] -Oh!

[static crackles]

[heartbeat thumps]

Famously then, Lucy became pregnant

in real life with their son, Desi Jr.,

which was very controversial, because there'd never

really been a pregnant character on a television show.

When she finds out she's going to have a baby

and she needs to tell Ricky.

She spends all day trying to find a quiet,

private moment to tell him.

She goes to the Tropicana.

Ricky is passed a note that says,

"My husband and I have just found out that

we're going to have a blessed event."

That's how they said it. [chuckles]

Ricky reads the note and doesn't realize who it's from.

He sees that Lucy's in the crowd and he kind of jokingly

points at her like, "Oh, is it you?"

And she nods, and he realizes that she's pregnant,

and that he's going to be a dad.

-Honey, no. -Yes.

-Really? -Yes.

It's me!

[laughter]

I'm gonna be a father!

And he sings while they dance together,

and they're crying.

They want to be parents so bad.

♪ We're having a baby ♪

The emotion, that scene when

they really cried, nothing can top that.

Lucy was in her early forties,

which especially at the time,

was quite old to be having a child.

I bet he's going to look just like you.

Oh, I hope not.

You can just see the fourth wall kind of goes away.

I'll bet she'll speak with an accent like you.

Lucy and Desi really break character.

This is not just happening on screen,

this is really happening to these two performers I adore.

♪ My baby ♪

♪ And me ♪

It's such a beautiful, truthful moment.

[applause]

Ricky, this is it.

-This is it! -This is it!

Let's go!

The whole episode is Lucy getting ready

to go into labor at any minute.

Desi's doing the best performance of his life

as Ricky, freaking out.

There's a creative genius and an ambition

to Desi Arnaz, and there's also some PT Barnum.

Ricky has to go to the club, and he gets into,

like, some crazy makeup.

Hello, Fred? It's here?

Yippee!

Then he runs to the hospital in the makeup still.

Oh, thank heavens you're back!

-Fred, how's Lucy? -Oh, she's great,

but I'm a wreck!

He isn't going to let the opportunity

of the birth of the baby to America's Sweetheart

go by without it being a major splash.

And it ends with little Ricky being presented to the world,

this beautiful, super round-headed little baby.

[inaudible cooing]

It's not a coincidence that the scheduled C-section

of Lucille Ball's baby is on the same day

that the episode airs.

For them to arrange for her to actually have her own child

on the day that the show airs, it's just so wonderful,

but again, speaks to her business sense.

She knew that would be a great publicity stunt.

The news headline that goes around is

"Lucy sticks to the script, it's a boy."

[Purdum] The real-life Desi Arnaz Jr.

was born on the same day as little Ricky,

and it was a sensation.

It drew an audience that was larger

than tuned in for Dwight Eisenhower's

inauguration as president the next day.

[Sumner-Pritchard] I mean, this is event television.

[Gunderson] The episode in which little Ricky is born,

to this day, holds the Nielsen Share ratings record

for most households with televisions

tuned into the same thing at the same time.

A record that is most likely never going to be broken.

Nobody does that today.

That's more than the Super Bowl,

that's more than anything that we could even imagine today.

[Purdum] In Chicago, at quarter past the hour,

halfway through the show,

the water pressure in the municipal water system

suddenly plunged because everybody was flushing

the toilet at the same time in the first commercial break.

'Cause it just-- it's unheard of.

[Gunderson] Lucy and Desi are really the first

major celebrity power couple in television.

[Sumner-Pritchard] People feel invested

in them as human beings.

They feel let into their lives.

That's really the genius behind the show,

is it's very parasocial.

A lot of celebrities now really recreate.

I mean, Taylor Swift is, like, the expert of this, right?

Her name is Lucy, both on and off camera.

It's fairly meta.

It almost makes the sitcom

even more believable.

Desi Jr. experiences a lifetime of being confused

with little Ricky from the show.

-[audience oohing] -Hi, Daddy!

Hi, partner!

They took me in as their own child and introduced me

to their children, Lucy Jr. and Desi Jr.,

who I became really good friends with as a kid,

and we grew up together.

[Lucy] Better get out of that outfit, dear.

You know, we want to surprise Daddy,

and he's going to be home any--

Oh, dear!

It was always that dynamic

of people getting us mixed up.

I think in Desi's mind, it was very hard.

He wanted to do what I did.

[Sumner-Pritchard] After the pregnancy episodes,

they are riding high.

The show, it just feels untouchable.

They are at the top of the world.

It is my pleasure to present the Television Academy's

1953 National Award for the Best Situation Comedy

to I Love Lucy.

[cheering and applause]

[Sumner-Pritchard] Nothing can go wrong, right?

And, you know, Joe McCarthy shows up on the scene.

[announcer] And before news cameras...

[announcer 2] Senator McCarthy in a dramatic confrontation.

You can't make good and honest motion pictures

in an atmosphere of fear.

[Sumner-Pritchard] And Lucy, the most famous person

in the world in television,

gets accused of being a communist

at the height of the McCarthy era.

[Michael Schneider] This was in the middle of the Red Scare.

It's a real dark stain on the business.

People were being wrongfully accused of being communists,

and really impacted a lot of talent in Hollywood.

[Sumner-Pritchard] That's the way her life works, right?

Like, every time, something goes wrong.

And this time, it's the thing that could genuinely end her.

All the other things, they're all pittance compared to this.

This is the thing that can get you put in jail,

get you blacklisted.

People really, really are scared of communists at this point.

This could end the show and put hundreds of people

out of work, and ruin everything that they've worked for.

[static crackles]

[heartbeat thumping]

[atmospheric music playing]

Lucy was a legitimately registered

member of the Communist Party.

The news really seized on it.

"Lucy's a Red, in hair and in spirit.

Lucy's a commie."

It's really debatable whether she cared

about politics really at all.

Like, in her spirit? Who knows?

She did it as a favor to her grandfather,

because he helped raise her.

It's a big scandal.

Lucy's really scared.

She's scared she's gonna get booed.

She worked so hard for her career,

it was terrifying for her.

[Sumner-Pritchard] Desi went out before

they filmed the next episode,

and he says that she's not a communist,

that she loves America, that he loves America.

Desi Arnaz was very patriotic about America.

Desi had a perfect response to that,

which is, "The only thing red about Lucy is her hair."

"That's not even real. My wife, Lucille Ball!"

People leap to their feet, applaud, screaming,

and it's over.

She was able to overcome it all, but I think the fact that

even she got dragged into it says a lot

about what was going on in America in the 1950s.

Desi pretty much shut it down.

Desi was a badass.

He just really

knew how to talk to people.

They are so important to the American people

that Lucy gets out of communism.

Like, Lucy gets out of McCarthyism

because of how important she is.

I Love Lucy's still enduring because it's funny.

It's still, first of all, just a fun watch.

[big band music playing]

Isn't it beautiful?

And you get a bunch of classic episodes that are the ones

that people who really love the show go back to the most,

and you get all of these celebrity guests.

William Holden shows up.

[laughter]

John Wayne shows up.

Harpo Marx shows up.

[laughter]

I'm inspired by what that show was able to do

that we're not allowed to do on television now.

There are takes on that show that last

four minutes with no dialogue.

And of course, Lucy goes to the famous

Brown Derby restaurant,

and she runs into William Holden,

and of course, she just wants to be a star, right?

But she ultimately sets her nose on fire.

Now tell me, Mrs. Ricardo, have you ever considered acting?

[both] Has she ever considered acting?

Somebody said, "Do you have a favorite one?"

And you just said the word "grapes,"

and people broke into applause.

I was a grape stomper.

[building laughter]

The woman that Lucy recorded that scene with very notably

was Italian, and she did not stage-wrestle Lucy.

So I made a dance out of it like this,

and finally I slipped.

And in slipping, I hit her, and she took offense,

and so she hauled off and let me have it.

[laughter]

She kept me down by the throat.

And I had grapes up my nose, in my ears,

and she was choking me,

and I'm really beating her to get her off.

And we had to stop, and somebody had to come in

and say, "Look, let her up a bit."

We had to get on with the scene.

She said, "Oh, yeah," and down we went again.

-And... Oh! -[laughter]

This woman doesn't realize this is, like, stage combat.

"We need to take it easy."

She almost drowns.

She, like, beat her up.

That was Lucille Ball's favorite episode

on record of I Love Lucy.

Don't do that at the table, dear.

-Do that again, son. -Ricky!

Looks like he's gonna be a drummer!

Well, he certainly is not.

That's the last thing in the world I want him to be.

I started playing drums when I was like, two years old

on trash cans in my backyard in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The audition for the I Love Lucy show,

they were looking to expand the part of little Ricky.

I went to meet Lucy, there in her glory.

There she was in the flesh, and she looked at me

and she said, "Well, he's cute, but what does he do?"

My dad said, "He plays the drums."

She said, "Well, there's a set of drums."

So I played, started jamming on the drums.

Finally, Desi himself came over,

started playing with me, stood up after a while,

laughed and said, "I think we found little Ricky."

[big band music playing]

[cheering and applause]

My dad said, "This is huge, this is a big deal."

Here I am, like, four and a half years old.

I was little Ricky.

The "Babalú" episode, the Ricardos go to Havana,

Lucy meets Desi's family,

and it's this whole dynamic there.

I love that episode, it's so sweet.

I'd like you to meet my son, Ricky Jr.

[Thibodeaux] It's a lot of pressure for a little kid.

I did other shows after that, but this was the big one.

It was in front of a live audience.

You did one take, and that was it.

It hurt my hand so much to do it because I'm not used to playing,

like, you know, the congos.

♪ Olé, olé, olé, olé! ♪

And it's like, my voice cracked and it was like, way up.

♪ Olé, olé, olé, olé! ♪

♪ Olé, olé, olé, olé! ♪

It was just kind of funny.

And Lucy was very demanding,

in everybody being right on cue.

Desi treated me really, really good.

He'd teach us how to fish and ride horses and swim.

I had a heart for him.

We can't stash away five dozen eggs!

You get the longest recorded laugh in I Love Lucy history.

They raise chickens.

Well, I'm gonna put

some in my blouse.

Lucy puts a ton of eggs

in her shirt,

and then has to practice a tango.

[audience screaming with laughter]

She keeps committing. She doesn't break.

The more the audience is laughing,

the more she goes for it.

It's the only time they ever cut a laugh down

in the show's history.

[static crackles]

[heartbeat thumping]

By the fall of 1957,

Desi and Lucy were pretty exhausted

from the weekly pace of the show.

It's unusual for a show to end when you're on top.

They could have probably kept going,

but I think they were just--

they were tired, and the show ends.

I think they called it at the right time.

She understood that, "Leave them wanting more."

There was identification with an American audience,

but with audiences

all over the world, we found out.

They didn't have to understand the language

to understand the predicament, and the way I got in,

and the way I got out, and the love at the end.

We always had a happy ending, and domestic situations

are very easily identified all over the world.

When the bar is set that high, that early,

we can all be grateful for what happens

in entertainment thereafter.

[big band music playing]

[Purdum] Because Desi had retained

the rights to I Love Lucy,

there were so many episodes in the can

that they were worth quite a lot.

They made the decision to sell them back to CBS

for something like $5 million.

With that nest egg, it became the seed money

that allowed them to buy

the RKO Studios lot in Hollywood,

which is where they'd met in 1940.

And that made them the largest physical plant of movies

and television in all of Los Angeles,

bigger than any of the other big studios.

Lucille Ball was your first female studio head.

She was, by all accounts, pretty good at it.

After she bought him out of the company in 1962,

she went on to lead it, and thereby became

the first female head of a studio in Hollywood.

It was the General Motors of television.

She was being asked to do something

that no other woman was being asked to do.

She was brave enough to leave her marriage.

She was brave enough to keep coming up

with new opportunities for herself and her talent.

[Sumner-Pritchard] They just consistently produced

more and more great shows, not just comedy TV.

[announcer]

[Sumner-Pritchard] The Untouchables, which really

created kind of the crime TV genre as we know it today.

["The Twilight Zone Opening Theme" playing]

[Purdum] Desilu produced what became The Twilight Zone.

In 1966, there were two pilots in development,

and her business advisors told her that

she'd wind up having to sell the studio if she greenlit them.

But she believed in both of those shows,

and she gave the go-ahead, and the two shows were

Star Trek and Mission Impossible.

["Star Trek Opening Theme" playing]

Warp One, Mr. Sulu.

["Mission Impossible Opening Theme" playing]

[Gunderson] Lucille Ball gets to a point

of having the confidence

to overrule her all-male board of directors

not once, but twice,

to greenlight and fund the pilot of what becomes Star Trek.

That was one that she got a lot of flack for,

but she believed in it, and now some people call her

the mother of sci-fi TV.

-They look like women from Mars! -[laughter]

Lucille Ball had vision.

She was a smart businesswoman, who was brave,

and also very, very savvy.

[Purdum] Desilu Studios became the largest producer

of television content in the world.

[Zucker] Because of what Lucille Ball did

in forming Desilu Productions,

and really was responsible

for the entire invention

of syndicated American television,

and that is what gave us all the shows

that we love today to be able to be seen in repeats.

[Schneider] Lucy and Desi created

television as we know it.

To this day, that's still how television operates.

That all started with I Love Lucy.

[audience laughter]

[Colucci] Most shows fade, and their legacy fades.

Maybe they spoke to the times

when they aired, but they don't age well.

I Love Lucy is so timeless.

For me, as a TV watcher,

I Love Lucy is the iconic show.

The way that she functioned as a lead character

is also really impactful.

You know, you see that in, like, Maude,

Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, this kind of woman with a dream.

A show like Carol Burnett, her physical comedy

definitely was influenced by Lucy.

We all are influenced by Lucy.

[Sumner-Pritchard] I was all about Lucille Ball,

but then once you learn everything that Desi did,

you can't separate

Lucille Ball's success from Desi Arnaz's genius.

Like, their geniuses complemented each other

in this gorgeous way that made everything work.

Their last words to each other are,

"I love you."

Then a few days later, Lucy is honored

at the Kennedy Center with a Kennedy Center Honor,

the biggest award an American performer can get.

When she gets announced, everybody jumps to their feet.

This is 30 years after I Love Lucy.

She couldn't believe it.

Robert Stack reads a letter that Desi wrote on his deathbed.

I Love Lucy had just one mission,

to make people laugh.

He talks a lot about how I Love Lucy

would have been nothing without Lucy.

[Robert Stack] Desi concluded, "Lucy was the show.

Viv and Fred and I were just props.

Damn good props, but props nevertheless.

PS...

I Love Lucy was never just a title."

[bright music playing]

And, I mean, he'd been dead for maybe five days.

Lucy is beside herself crying.

"I Love Lucy was never just a title."

I think that was a really beautiful gift

that he gave her at the end,

in such a public way, and to just say,

"You were the heart and soul and the spirit and the star,

and it was wonderful to be able to support you."

It's so beautiful.

♪ I love Lucy and she loves me ♪

♪ We're as happy as two can be ♪

♪ Sometimes we quarrel ♪

♪ But then I will love making up again ♪

♪ Lucy kisses like no one can ♪

♪ She's my missus and I'm her man ♪

♪ And life is heaven, you see ♪

♪ 'Cause I love Lucy ♪

♪ Yes, I love Lucy, and Lucy loves me ♪

[applause]

[music fades]

[theme music playing]