TV SERIES · 1962– · USA
The Lucy Show
32 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (32)
- #001
The Lucy Show was initially planned to run for only one season. Ball and Desi Arnaz's studio, Desilu, was losing money, and Arnaz persuaded Ball to return to television to help make the studio viable again. Ball agreed to do the series only if it aired on Monday nights and involved her former co-star Vivian Vance and her former writers.
- #002
Vivian Vance refused to agree to appear in the series unless she was allowed to wear beautiful clothes.
- #003
In the episode where Lucy and Viv are trapped in the shower and it begins to flood, Lucille Ball was actually drowning for a few seconds, submerged and unable to pull herself up. When you see Viv lift her, she is in fact saving her life. They kept this take for the broadcast episode.
- #004
Vivian Bagley was the first normal divorced character on television.
- #005
Vivian Vance left the program after the third season. She was living in Connecticut and was tired of commuting and of leaving her husband.
- #006
From the second season onward it was filmed in color, but it was not broadcast in color until the fourth season.
- #007
Fed up with Joan Crawford's inability to memorize her lines, Lucille Ball was said to have asked her producer friends whether Gloria Swanson was available to film the episode (she was not).
- #008
William Frawley appeared for several seasons on My Three Sons (1960), which began after I Love Lucy (1951) ended, though Desilu produced it. Because this series was filmed in the same studio and Frawley still held a grudge against Vivian Vance, he threw empty film cans at her through the window and played various other pranks.
- #009
In interviews, Lucy said that because she divorced Desi, she received more hate mail than when she was accused of being a communist by the House of Un-American Activity.
- #010
The series' sixth and final season had its highest ratings: it placed second in the ratings after The Andy Griffith Show (1960).
- #011
Garry Marshall wrote for this series for a time. In interviews he admitted he used the experience to help develop Laverne & Shirley (1976), another show in which two female friends get into comedic mischief together.
- #012
After filming the final episode of the 1966-1967 season, Lucille Ball had worked director Maury Thompson so hard that he was reduced to tears. Maury Thompson later admitted to his colleague Tommy Thompson (no relation) that after working him so hard and insisting on her own methods during filming, Lucille Ball wanted to give him a raise, but said nothing about it until he returned from a South American vacation the following week. Unfortunately, while Maury was away, Tommy spilled the beans to him and he was furious, and then rehired Jack Donahue, who had directed every episode of the series in its first three seasons, to direct the final season's episodes. After returning from his vacation the following week, Maury Thompson was cheerfully informed by Tommy Thompson that Lucille Ball had canned him.
- #013
Lucille Ball's vocal cords are believed to have become seriously roughened between the last Lucy/Desi comedy hour and the first season of this series, when she performed on Broadway nightly in Wildcat; during this time a polyp developed on her larynx that permanently changed the shape of her voice. In her acceptance speech for the 1968 Emmy Award she received for this series, you can hear that her voice is much lower than it was on I Love Lucy. And in this series you can tell she is trying to screech toward that high-pitched I Love Lucy little-girl voice that made her so popular, which was probably damaging her vocal cords.
- #014
During this period when Lucy was appearing in this series, she greenlit Star Trek (1966). In a recent Emmy TV Legends interview, Lucie Arnaz said this was one of the best decisions she made as president of Desilu. And in fact, thanks to Lucy's decision to greenlight the series, it became one of the most successful television series in Hollywood history; its first two spin-offs to premiere, Star Trek Discovery and Picard, aired 50 years later.
- #015
The breakfast cereal the actors ate, which tended to be photographed like oatmeal, was actually applesauce, which held up better under the hot studio lights.
- #016
Lucille Ball was known to treat her co-stars badly. Joan Blondell appeared in the series, and Ball told her between takes that she "stunk." Blondell responded in front of the audience: "F--k you Lucille Ball!"
- #017
It is loosely adapted from Irene Kampen's book "Life without George."
- #018
Although it never received credit for it, this series was groundbreaking in many ways. First of all, in the early '60s, having a household run by two women without husbands was both bold and groundbreaking. Viv also played a divorced person, a first for a lead character in a TV series. Lucy also, toward the end of the series, got a job working as the secretary of banker Mr. Mooney. Until that point there had never been a working mother on television either. Given Lucy's silly and clumsy portrayal, it can hardly be called a "feminist show," but it pushed boundaries.
- #019
Lucy's major project after I Love Lucy and before The Lucy Show was the Broadway show Wildcat. With music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh and book by N. Richard Nash, Wildcat tells the story of a frontier woman named Wildcat Jackson who comes to a border town in the American Southwest with dreams of striking oil and tricks the foreman Joe Dynamite into helping her. It opened on December 16, 1960, and is remembered as comedian Lucille Ball's only Broadway appearance, though the cast also included Keith Andes, Paula Stewart, Edith King and a young Valerie Harper (Rhoda) in the dance ensemble. Wildcat closed on June 3, 1961, after two intermissions and 171 performances.
- #020
Charles Lane appeared occasionally as Mr. Barnsdahl in the first season. However, Lane had difficulty remembering his lines and his character was written out of the series.
- #021
Lucy and Viv's address was 132 Post Road.
- #022
Garry Marshall became a staff writer on the series. After he sent Lucy a script for her approval, she returned it a few minutes later with a note written on the front page in magic marker: "THIS IS ****!"
- #023
Before Shirley Partridge began working with her son on behalf of The Partridge Family, she worked as a bank clerk, which made her one of TV's first working mothers. But she was not the first: Lucy also had a job as a secretary in a bank on The Lucy Show (1962), which was likewise a program about a working mother. Maureen Robinson (June Lockhart) was a doctor on Lost in Space (1965), which also meant she was a working mother.
- #024
This was Lucy's first project after her notorious 1961 Broadway failure "Wildcat."
- #025
After appearing in a disappointing Broadway show, "Wildcat," and several other failed projects, Lucy returned to television with a sitcom that was exactly the same as the last one. Many people in the industry saw her failure to jump from I Love Lucy (1951) into some kind of film career as an admission of failure. But at the time Desilu Productions was in danger and faced being shut down, so she had to take desperate measures. She planned for this series to last only about two years, and the decision was entirely for financial reasons.
- #026
Gossip columnist Liz Smith also said she never liked Lucy: "I'm sorry I ever met her," she said.
- #027
Lucy receives a great deal of criticism for bullying and mistreating her co-stars. But Desi Arnaz could also be very harsh. (Perhaps that is where she got it.) On a recent episode of Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Rob Reiner said he was hired to play a hippie on the Desilu sitcom The Mother's in Law. During rehearsals he began improvising; at that, Desi stood up and started yelling at him that they had paid $10,000 for the script and how dare he read the lines. Reiner said Desi cursed at him and pinned him against the wall during the tirade, at which point Rob quit. Clearly Lucy was not the only bad producer in the Desilu group!
- #028
While working on this series, Candy Moore, Ralph Hart and Jimmy Garrett had to attend school on the Desilu lot for three hours every day. Their teacher's name was Mrs. Haney.
- #029
In the twelfth episode of the sixth season, "Lucy Sues Mooney," Lew Carter, playing Lucy's lawyer, said he had "just been talking to Lady Bird." This was Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson, who was First Lady in 1967, the year the episode aired.
- #030
Paula Stewart was to appear alongside Lucy in the Broadway show "Wildcat," playing Lucy's younger sister. She would later appear on "The Lucy Show" and form a lifelong friendship with Lucy. She also recently wrote a book about her experiences with Lucy.
- #031
This series was allegedly nicknamed the Dykes Sans Dick Show at the network.
- #032
Before appearing in I Love Lucy (1951), The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957) and this series, Lucille Ball had her big acting break in the Three Stooges short Three Little Pigskins (1934).
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