October 15, 1951
Lucy, You Got Some ‘Splainin’ To Do!
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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth. To generate interest in the Centennial, this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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In 1940, RKO Pictures released the film adaptation of a Broadway musical, Rodgers and Hart’s Too Many Girls. Modestly successful at the box office, the movie might have faded into cinema history except for one minor detail:
That’s where Lucy met Desi.
Lucille Ball – yes, that was her real name! – was born in Jamestown, New York in 1911. She spent much of her early career working on vaudeville stages, shaping a comic style around her rubbery face and pinpoint physical timing. Lucy was a showbiz grinder – a chorus girl, B-movie actress, and radio voice. After two decades of middling success, she found her niche on the CBS radio comedy My Favorite Husband, where a talent for farce, awkward charm, and big reactions found an audience.
Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III was born in Santiago Cuba in 1917, the scion of an affluent and politically connected Cuban family. His father was the mayor of Santiago and a member of the Cuban House of Representatives; his grandfather was one of Cuba’s wealthiest sugar barons. But all their property was confiscated in the Cuban Revolution of 1933, and the family fled to Miami. Instead of chauffeurs and private tutors, teenaged Desi took on menial jobs to help support the family, like cleaning out bird cages in the pet department of Woolworth’s.
Drawn to the Afro-Cuban rhythms of his native island, Desi studied guitar and percussion. His first big break came when he joined the most popular Latin dance band of the time, the Xavier Cugat Orchestra. Recognizing Arnaz’s talent and charisma, Cugat put Desi in the spotlight as a vocalist and conga player.
Desi became a bandleader in his own right in the late 1930s, and the Desi Arnaz Orchestra popularized the conga dance craze in the U.S., especially in New York nightclubs. Soon, his dynamic mix of musicianship and charm led to his biggest break: he was cast in the 1940 film version of Too Many Girls, where he met Lucille Ball.
The Whirlwind Romance
Lucy and Desi’s on-screen chemistry didn’t amount to much, but what started as an off-screen flirtation quickly escalated into a whirlwind romance. Six months later, they eloped to Greenwich, Connecticut, and plunged into one of Hollywood’s most incandescent marriages.
Desi was a touring musician while Lucy was making films in Hollywood. They needed a creative vehicle to keep them working in the same city – preferably Los Angeles. When CBS approached Lucy about adapting My Favorite Husband for television, she agreed on one condition: her real-life husband had to play her television husband, too.
The network was dubious. A redheaded American comedienne married to a thickly accented Cuban bandleader? Would viewers buy it? But after seeing audience reactions to a live, vaudeville-style stage show featuring the couple, CBS green-lit the project.
With sponsorship from Philip Morris, CBS launched I Love Lucy on October 15, 1951. From the very first episode, the show topped the ratings and Lucille Ball quickly became a national obsession.
Each episode was written around a simple premise: Desi and Lucy Arnaz basically played themselves as Ricky and Lucy Ricardo. Lucy, as a housewife with big dreams but no discernible talent, tried each week to match her bandleader husband’s show biz success. Her screwups often ended with Ricky scolding her in his thick Cuban accent, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!”
Four minutes from the first episode of I Love Lucy.
The cast was rounded out by the Ricardos’ neighbors, Fred and Ethel Mertz, played by William Frawley and Vivian Vance. The foursome’s sarcastic but endearing chemistry anchored the series. Vivian Vance, in particular, broke out as the first true female sitcom sidekick, a foil who could carry both a plot and a punchline.
Everybody Loves Lucy
Legend has it that during the six years that I Love Lucy first aired, water utilities in some cities noticed a huge pressure drop during commercial breaks and immediately after the show ended, as millions of viewers simultaneously flushed their toilets.
I Love Lucy didn’t just generate laughs, it produced several important breakthroughs: It was the first regularly scheduled TV show to star an ethnically mixed couple – a white American actress and a Cuban-born bandleader1. And it was the first television show to portray a pregnancy – though network censors forbade the use of the word “pregnant.”
But I Love Lucy’s biggest breakthrough was not in what was portrayed on the screen, but in how it was produced for the screen – and the impact those decisions had on the entire business of television.
In New York, live television was produced with several video cameras on a stage; in the control room, the director switched between different cameras for long shots and closeups from different angles. The show went out live over the air and was lost to posterity unless a film camera was aimed at a monitor to make a “kinescope” recording of the broadcast.2
The enterprising Desi Arnaz had several tricks up his sleeve.
First, he and Lucy wanted to produce their show using three film cameras. They wanted to produce it in Hollywood, not New York (even though New York was the setting of the show). And they wanted to film it in front of a studio audience in order to preserve the unpredictable energy of a live stage performance.
Rolling The Dice
But Desi’s biggest gamble was his insistence that the show be shot with 35mm film so that episodes could be rebroadcast – something the kinescope recordings could not be used for.
In what would prove to be one of the most short-sighted cost-savings in television history, CBS balked at the added expense of three cameras rolling expensive 35mm film.
To accommodate Desi’s demands, the network insisted that he take a pay cut of roughly $1,000 per episode. Desi agreed, but only if the network made one crucial concession: He and Lucy would retain ownership of all the filmed episodes.
With those terms dialed in, Desi called on veteran cinematographer Karl Freund, who devised a way of synchronizing the cameras. Freund then orchestrated the studio lighting and camera blocking to preserve visual continuity between all three cameras. The carefully staged cinematography assured seamless editing in post production. And everything was performed before a live studio audience.
The result was nothing less than a revolution in television production. Using three cameras simultaneously allowed multiple angles of a single take – usually two opposing closeups and a wide angle. The performers enjoyed the reactions of the audience, and the shows were recorded on high-quality film that could be preserved, re-edited, and – critically – syndicated into infinite reruns.
Desi Arnaz was the the architect, and Karl Freund the general contractor; together they created the system that would be used for decades to follow on shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cheers, and Friends.
When I Love Lucy became a national phenomenon, Desi and Lucy controlled the reruns. After the show’s network run ended in 1957, they put its 180 episodes into syndication, and I Love Lucy became one of the most ubiquitous shows on television. Through the 1960s and 70s, you could hardly turn a TV dial without landing on an episode of I Love Lucy.
The Payoff
When talking about the financial arrangements, Desi Arnaz later estimated that – after taxes and other considerations – he had effectively paid CBS about $5,000 to own the show. In other words, by Desi’s estimate, the network saved about $5,000. But over the years to come, he and Lucy earned millions.
In much the same way that animation laid the foundation of Walt Disney’s empire, Desi Arnaz’s clever deal making laid the foundation for an empire of Desi and Lucy’s own.
Before the first episode of I Love Lucy premiered in 1951, the couple formed Desilu Productions, with Desi as president and executive producer. In 1957, with the abundant proceeds from their hit show, they acquired the RKO studio lots – poetically, the place where they met on the set of Too Many Girls in 1940.
But by the time I Love Lucy ran its last episode on CBS in May, 1957, there was trouble in paradise. Desi’s drinking and serial philandering doomed their partnership. The marriage was effectively over at the same time as the show, though their divorce was not final until 1960. Desi stepped down from his role, Lucy bought out his share of the business, and became the first woman to run a Hollywood studio.
Over the course of her stewardship, Desilu produced some of the most popular and iconic shows in television’s next generation, among them The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, and Star Trek.
She also created two new shows for herself: The Lucy Show aired 156 episodes over six seasons from 1962-1968 and reunited Lucy with Vivian Vance; and Here’s Lucy ran 144 episodes over another six seasons from 1968-1974, with her real-life children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., playing her kids on-screen
The Never Ending Love Story
Lucille Ball ran Desilu Studios until 1967, when she sold it to Gulf+Western for a reported $17 million ($150 million in 2026 dollars). Gulf+Western turned Desilu into the cornerstone of Paramount Television.
Desi Arnaz mostly stepped back from acting and producing, but the impact of the show that he and Lucy created – and the business model that he pioneered – left a lasting impact on the industry. Despite their divorce, their mutual respect endured. Lucy later said, “It was a hell of a love story.” Arnaz, just before his death in 1986, called I Love Lucy “the best thing we ever did together.”
Desi died just a few months before his 70th birthday, and spoke with Lucy by phone shortly before he died. Her last words to him were “I love you.”
Lucy moved on to the Great Studio in The Sky in 1989 at age 77.
The dial has given away to the remote, but just a few minutes of channel surfing can still pull up an episode of I Love Lucy.
Or, you can dial up a vast library of clips and full episodes on YouTube:
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1 It took much longer for “black/white” coupling to find a presence on TV.
The first mere kiss between a white actor and a black actress took place in an episode of Star Trek in 1968, when white actor William Shatner as Captain Kirk kissed black actress Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura. Though their kiss was forced by alien telekinesis, it was nevertheless groundbreaking – and controversial. In a footnote to this footnote, Star Trek was produced by DesiLu Studios, Lucy and Desi Arnaz’s production company.
The first mixed-race couple in a continuing role were Tom and Helen Willis, introduced in the first episode of The Jefferson’s – a spinoff from Norman Lear’s equally groundbreaking All In The Family (#37) in 1975. Portrayed by (white) Franklin Cover and (black) Roxie Roker the Willises were the first recurring, married black-white couple on a U.S. primetime sitcom. They were portrayed as equals, were part of the main cast, and their relationship was central to the show’s dynamic. And in another footnote to this footnote, Roxie Roker was married to white television producer Sy Kravitz. Their son is the musician and actor Lenny Kravitz.
2 “Kinescope” was the name that RCA gave to an otherwise generic cathode ray tube TV display. The name carried over when film cameras were used to make recordings of TV shows before videotape was introduced in 1956
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