'I Love Lucy' turns 75, and everyone still loves it

Sal St. George is what's known as a "renaissance man," or probably as close to one as you'll find in Medford, where he lives with his wife, Mary. Over the decades, he's written and produced numerous plays and musicals for museums, historical societies and even Disney World and Universal Orlando. Then, there are his various Long Island University lecture series, "virtual road trips" on Zoom, and books, including one he just finished about Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. (This renaissance man also happens to be a walking, talking Wikipedia on Hollywood history.)

But for St. George there has been just one show — more of an ongoing love affair, really — which endures. That's "I Love Lucy" and it turns 75 on Thursday.

"In terms of the work I do as an adjunct at LIU, the Lucy lectures are the most popular ones I have," he says. "I have no idea why, but if we put on an 'I Love Lucy' episode, we pack the room, and it's been going on like this for years."

St. George, who also wrote and produced a play about the show's star, Lucille Ball, for the Ward Melville Heritage Organization in Stony Brook in 2013, calls the bond he and so many others have a "lifelong one, which I hear from my guests whenever they come in for a lecture or to see an episode: 'I remember sitting in the '50s watching 'I Love Lucy' with my mother, and now I'm sitting with my grandchildren. ... This is something that does not die but continues, and Desi [Arnaz, Ball's husband] said it best, that the title of the show wasn't just a title but the way he felt.' "

And the way everyone else has felt too, apparently.

In survey after survey over the years, three sitcoms usually fill out the top three — "Seinfeld," "I Love Lucy" and "All in the Family." Typically "Seinfeld" is ranked the consensus "best" while "All in the Family" rounds out the top three as most influential — although a 2012 ABC News/People survey did place "Lucy" at the top as the best television show ever.

But aside from surveys of "best" or "most influential," if there were ones for most durable, most ineffaceable, most memorable, most beloved, then those consensus winners would appear to be obvious, as they have been pretty much since 1951.

" 'I Love Lucy' is the television show by which all other television shows have been judged and will always be judged," says Leslie Feldman, professor of political science at Hofstra University, who has written a number of books on classic television shows, including "Lucy."

How 'Lucy' became 'Lucy'

Parsing this 75-year-old love affair is really not so hard. All you have to do is watch, which is easy enough because "I Love Lucy" has never been off the air. A staple of marathons (most recently on MeTV) tied to anniversaries and birthdays (typically Ball's, who was born Aug. 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York), "I Love Lucy" is now firmly embedded in streaming TV, too, from Pluto to Paramount+. It also airs Sundays at 11:30 a.m. on MeTV.

But the deeper history is especially important in tracing this durability. The show arrived Oct. 15, 1951 on CBS, at 9 p.m., when the networks — there were four, including DuMont — were still taking shape, still unsure of themselves, still scrambling to fill blank schedules. There were about 14 million TV sets in use, but what people could actually see on those sets was a hodgepodge of comedy, musical performances and live drama.

Viewers in the few major cities connected by cable could actually see many of these shows live for the first time that season, but everyone else had to rely on kinescopes. A kinescope was something that was filmed directly off the screen so the networks could prove to sponsors that their commercials actually aired. Those tapes were then sent out to other stations around the country which didn't have a live hookup to New York (where most of the live programs originated). The quality was execrable, which was something Ball and Arnaz were determined to avoid in their first TV venture.

Ball, who had wrapped her hit radio show, "My Favorite Husband," seven months earlier, made several demands of CBS. Foremost, she and Arnaz refused to move from Los Angeles to New York to produce "I Love Lucy." She was five months pregnant at the time, and had no interest in moving anyway. She also insisted that the Cuban-born Arnaz play her TV spouse (CBS wanted Richard Denning, her fictional husband on radio).

Finally, she wanted a studio big enough to seat an audience because she performed best in front of people. The network was gobsmacked. Nobody told CBS what to do, certainly not a paid performer. In an instance of casual bigotry that would be played out countless times in the future on countless other shows, its executives absolutely did not want someone other than a white, Anglo-Saxon playing her husband.

In perhaps TV's earliest instance of a test screening, she and Arnaz launched a road show which they toured around the country that summer and which reflected her sitcom-to-be. With the road show a success, CBS was forced to accept Arnaz. Next, the couple got their studio — a big one right in the heart of Hollywood, with enough room for that audience.

Ball and Arnaz were still not finished. They also wanted a three-camera setup to film the show — one camera for a wide angle, the others for reaction shots. That was the biggest challenge because no one knew how to get the lighting right. Arnaz and Ball hired an old friend, Karl Freund, a legendary cinematographer who'd won an Oscar in 1937 for "The Good Earth." He would figure that out.

And there was one last little piece of business: Arnaz wanted and got rights to own the episodes in perpetuity. For once, CBS was happy to comply because who would ever want to watch repeats of a show that had already aired? Arnaz wanted them so that the network could run repeats when Ball was on maternity leave. They ultimately funded one of the great production companies of TV history.

When "I Love Lucy" arrived on that fall night in 1951, viewers had never seen anything like this — a filmed minimasterpiece, with cinematic light, shadow, depth, and dimension — or anything like her. The supporting cast was an instant classic — Vivian Vance as Ethel Mertz, and William Frawley, her crank of a spouse, Fred, who were also the landlords and friends of the Ricardos. Arnaz, of course, was Ricky Ricardo, instantly and nearly as indelible as his real-life wife.

The first filmed episode, "Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her" was held for a few weeks; the first episode to air was "The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub." In essence, "Nightclub" had core elements of all the other 179 episodes to follow: Lucy wants something; Ricky says no; the inevitable fallout from her thwarted ambitions; Ball's insuperable gifts on display as the greatest physical comedian television would ever know.

What viewers also saw in that first show was the future. "I Love Lucy" established what most sitcoms would go on to become, with three cameras, flat lighting and studio audiences (or canned laughter in lieu of that). In the years to come, Ball and Arnaz's Desilu produced nearly 20 other network shows, many of them hits. When Ball bought out her then ex-husband's share of the company in 1962, she would produce another half-dozen, including (arguably) the other most influential series in TV history, "Star Trek."

Making magic

But why "Lucy"? Why that enduring magic? Seventy-five years is a long time to sort out memories, and emotions. No one necessarily remembers anything else that aired on the proto-networks that fall (go ahead, try). Besides "Lucy," there's really nothing else much worth remembering anyway; Arthur Godfrey was the giant of radio and TV in 1951, now essentially a footnote.

Phillip Harwood, adult reference librarian for Elmont Memorial Library — and like St. George, a cineaste with a deep familiarity of classic movies and TV who also runs a popular film lecture series — explains that "the comedy still rings true. We laugh at the antics, we laugh at the fact that she's constantly trying to get into show business, and on Ricky's better side. And we still laugh at the set pieces — the candy factory, the giant bread, Vitameatavegamin," the alcohol-laced health tonic from 1952's "Lucy Does a TV Commercial."

"We also love it because it takes place in Manhattan," he adds. "It's a New York story, then goes to Connecticut, but they still stayed on the East Coast. It's a New York comedy."

By the sixth and final season, the Ricardos had moved to Westport, Connecticut — tony then, much tonier now — because Lucy wanted to move to the country. (The Mertzes would follow.) The symbolism of relocation was important, too, just as it was when the Jeffersons moved on up to the East Side 20 years later.

As Hofstra's Feldman writes in her 2019 book, "The Political Theory of  I  Love Lucy: Speed It Up!," "Lucy ... is upwardly mobile. She wants to move to Westport, to a big suburban house ... She wants to dance at the country club and go to charm school and get a million dollars. She wants to be rich and famous. Ricky, not so much. She wants to speed up their social mobility."

It's that archetype of upward social mobility that bonded "I Love Lucy" so closely to audiences in 1951 — and still does, explains Feldman.

"'Speed It Up' refers to when Lucy is working on the assembly line in the chocolate factory, when the overseer says 'speed it up,' " she says. "But the larger meaning of 'speed it up' is that everyone after World War II really wanted to speed up social mobility and wanted to achieve success and the American dream and they wanted to do it quickly.

"The show's iconic because it came about at a time in American history with the rise of the stay-at-home housewife, the rise of the suburbs, post-World War II, William Levitt building the suburbs on Long Island and elsewhere. The post-World War II veterans had come back from the war, and they were growing up with 'I Love Lucy" just as they were moving to the suburbs.

The show, Feldman says, "really became part of the American dream."

"It's post-World War II and people in suburbia were seeing a bit of themselves in her," says Lisa Berman, a veteran actress of plays and musicals who starred as Lucy in the 2013 production of "The Lucille Ball Story" that St. George wrote. "She was the housewife who always had a little plan, and always a little something that she was going to get."

In that play, she got a box at her door which (of course) she just couldn't resist opening. When she did, dozens of helium filled balloons floated out, which she then struggled to put back in the box. Berman, who lives in Roslyn Heights, says "I just tried to get a sense of her comedic timing, and how she approached it from a comic point of view. She's one of a kind, and I think I've always kind of imitated her. I watched her so much as a kid that there is a bond. I'm not a native Long Islander — I grew up in Boston — but that bond is universal."

So, why that enduring magic?

St. George, 76, says "you had a group of people going into a brand-new field of endeavor and they all truly believed in their product. They were very respectful of the audience and wanted to make sure everything was perfect.

"I think the magic is that they made is special."

And how.