I Love Lucy

I Love Lucy was an American situation comedy that debuted on CBS in October 1951 and ran for six years. For four of its six years, it was the highest-rated series on television, and it remained in the top three for the two years that it slipped from first place. During those six years, it earned its place in television history through its innovative production, its challenges to what Americans would accept in family comedy, and, perhaps most significantly, its presentation of television's first multicultural family.

Lucille Desiree Ball was born in Jamestown, New York, on August 6, 1911, into a lower-middle-class, Protestant family. Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III was born March 2, 1917, in Santiago de Cuba, the privileged son of the town's mayor until a military coup in Cuba forced a considerably poorer Arnaz family to flee to Miami. They met on an RKO lot where both were filming and were married on November 30, 1940. Ball, failing to find the movie stardom she had sought, was starring with Richard Denning in a CBS radio comedy called My Favorite Husband when CBS decided that the comedy about a ditzy woman and her banker husband would transfer to television. They wanted Ball to star, but she was interested only if the deal included Arnaz as her costar. The network didn't think America would tune in to watch a sitcom with a Latino husband. Ball turned down the offer.

She and Arnaz went on the road. They toured the nation, playing six or seven shows a day. Audiences’ enthusiastic reception of the team was enough to persuade the network to give them a chance. CBS assumed the show would be shot in New York, as most shows were at the time. The plans were also to shoot in kinescope. Ball and Arnaz preferred to shoot the program in Hollywood, and Arnaz was insistent that it be shot on film, a more expensive proposition. When the network balked, Ball and Arnaz agreed to take $1,000-per-episode salary cuts. In exchange, their production company, Desilu, would retain full ownership rights to the show.

On October 15, 1951, I Love Lucy debuted. It was also Arnaz's idea to use three cameras. He and cinematographer Karl Freund adapted the three-camera system, and the show became the first to be filmed before a studio audience. Syndication was unheard of in 1951, but Arnaz had ensured the show's endurance and prosperity. Half a century later, the cost of broadcasting a single episode was $100,000, 20 times what Arnaz paid for half the rights to all the episodes. I Love Lucy has been syndicated in 80 countries. Desilu went on to produce other top TV shows as well Our Miss Brooks, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, The Andy Griffith Show, and Star Trek among them. Ball bought out Arnaz's share in Desilu Productions when the couple divorced in 1960. She became the first woman to run a major television studio. She sold the company to Gulf-Western in 1967 for $17 million.

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