I Love Lucy took off right from the start and was the Number 3 prime-time TVshow in its first season. After that it held on to the Number 1 spot every year it was on except for the 1955-56 season, when The $64,000 Question pushed it to Number 2.

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The familiar animated heart that opens the show was actually created for the syndicated reruns of the series. The original openings featured animated stick figures of Lucy and Desi, occasionally scrambling around a cigarette pack that was one of their sponsor's (Phillip Morris) products.

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Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball invented the concept of syndicating TV shows when they insisted the series be filmed out in L.A. and distributed across the country. Formerly, stations outside the area where a show was produced got an inferior (visually) kinescoped copy, or one that was taped from a TV monitor. Film lasted forever, and the Arnazes had brokered a deal whereby they owned the filmed episodes of I Love Lucy. Thus, it was a landmark $5 million sale to CBS (in the late 1950s) that marked the beginning of syndication profits for off-network reruns of hit TV shows.

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Vance was hired on the recommendation of first-year I Love Lucy director Marc Daniels; he took Desi to San Diego, where Vance was appearing in The Voice of the Turtle. Desi was hooked, and hired his Ethel without Lucy having met her. The first rehearsals were a bit tense, but once Lucy realized what a fine actress Vance was (she'd honed her talents on and off Broadway during the 1930s and 1940s), Lucy warmed up to her co-star.

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The rumors that Vance was required by contract to be heavier than Lucy, so as to appear frumpier, were probably fueled by a fake "gag" contract given to Vance by Lucy in the 1950s, which Vance read to her in the 1970s on the Dinah talk show. In it, Vance was admonished to stay overweight, among other things.

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Frawley and Vance were not fond of each other in real life; the feud began when he overheard Vance moan about playing a woman that was married to someone "old enough to be her father." From then on, it was war. It didn't help when Vance refused to do a spin-off featuring the Mertzes after I Love Lucy ended its run, dreading the prospect of being stuck acting opposite Frawley for years to come.

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Desi matured into a real business genius, building Desilu Studios into the premier producing facility of its day; its filmed output at one point rivaled many of the major Hollywood (movie) studios. Desilu eventually bought and absrobed RKO Studios, where both Lucy and Desi had worked in films in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Arnaz also perfected the three-camera shooting technique with I Love Lucy's Oscar-winning cinematographer, Karl Freund, that captured close-ups, medium shots, and long shots, which were then edited together to create the show.

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When Lucy gave birth to Little Ricky on the air, and Desi Jr. in real life, on the same day, the event overshadowed President Eisenhower's inauguration in the newspapers the next day, and got one of TV's biggest viewing audiences and a record 71.7 rating (meaning more than two-thirds of the total viewing audience was tuned in). That record was finally broken several years later when a country singer named Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.

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I Love Lucy was the first major TV series to incorporate the pregnancy of its star into the plots of the show.

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Much was made about Lucy's red hair, which, of course, couldn't be seen in back-and-white. The color was given to her when she worked at MGM studios in the 1940s, by famed movie hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff. Lucy photographed so beautifully in the Technicolor process that she got the nickname Tessie Technicolor. She wore the trademark red-orange hue ever after.

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On the show, Lucy was the only character allowed to make fun of Desi's fractured English, because the love between them was obvious. When any other person did it, it just seemed mean.

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I Love Lucy was more than loosely based on Lucy's radio hit, My Favorite Husband, which had run on CBS for three years (194801951). Head writer and producer Jess Oppenheimer and writers Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh wrote the radio program as a battle between two couples, one younger and less established, the other older and more conservative, and adapted many of the same scripts for the TV show that followed.

 

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In My Favorite Husband, the older couple was voiced by Gale Gordon and Bea Benaderet, both of whom Lucy wanted for the TV series. But Gordon was already comitted to Our Miss Brooks, and Benaderet was playing neighbor Blanche Morton on The Burns & Allen Show.

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I Love Lucy was still number one in the ratings when Lucy and Desi decided to call it quits. They wanted to go out on top, as opposed to running the concept into the ground. It remains one of the few shows to exit network TV at its peak.

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Lucy and Desi were not done with the characters of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, however. They resurrected them (and the Mertzes) for 13 hour-long episodes of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, broadcast as part of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse from 1957-1960.