The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour

"We Love Lucy" redirects here. Not to be confused with I Love Lucy.

The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour
Format	Situation comedy
Created by	Jess Oppenheimer Madelyn Davis Bob Carroll, Jr.
Written by	Madelyn Davis Bob Carroll, Jr. Bob Schiller Bob Weiskopf
Directed by	Jerry Thorpe Desi Arnaz
Starring	Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Vivian Vance William Frawley Richard Keith
Composer(s)	Wilbur Hatch
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	13 (List of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Desi Arnaz
Producer(s)	Bert Granet
Running time	60 minutes
Production company(s)	Desilu Productions
Distributor	CBS Television Distribution
Broadcast
Original channel	CBS
Original run	November 6, 1957 (1957-11-06) – April 1, 1960 (1960-04-01)
Chronology
Preceded by	I Love Lucy (1951-1957)
Followed by	The Lucy Show

The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour is a CBS television situation comedy. The show is a collection of 13 occasional one-hour specials spread out over 1957-60 rather than a 30-minute regular series and originally served as part of Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. Its original network title was The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show for the first season and The Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse Presents The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show for the following seasons. It was the successor to the classic comedy, I Love Lucy, and featured the same major cast members. The production schedule avoided the grind of a regular weekly series. Desilu produced the show, which was mostly filmed at their Los Angeles studios with occasional on-location shoots at Lake Arrowhead, Las Vegas and Sun Valley, Idaho. CBS reran the show under the "Lucy-Desi" title during the summers of 1962-67, after which it went into syndication.

Description and evaluation

A scene from "Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana", 1957.

During the final season of I Love Lucy, the Ricardos and Mertzes moved to Westport, Connecticut, which reflected the growth of the suburbs throughout America. The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour was also set in the new suburban locale, only at a one-hour length (note: the first episode, "Lucy Takes a Cruise to Havana," originally ran 75 minutes), and with guest stars such as Ann Sothern; Rudy Vallee; Tallulah Bankhead; Fred MacMurray and June Haver; Betty Grable and Harry James; Fernando Lamas; Maurice Chevalier; Danny Thomas and his Make Room for Daddy co-stars; Red Skelton; Paul Douglas; Ida Lupino and Howard Duff; Milton Berle; Robert Cummings; and, in the final episode (called "Lucy Meets the Moustache"), Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams. While the new Comedy Hour shows were longer in length (one hour vs. I Love Lucy's thirty minutes, including commercials), the comedy specials only aired sporadically, usually with new episodes airing once per month, or sometimes once even every couple of months.

For the 1957-58 and the 1958-59 seasons of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show,, the ratings were very good. However, by the start of the 1959-60 season, with the habit of viewing Lucy broken up every few months, as well as the obvious tension revealed between Ball and Arnaz due to their real-life marriage unraveling, the ratings for the specials began to slip. Critics began to notice a lackluster quality not only with the scripts but also with the performances of the cast members as well. In fact, there were many episodes in which constant bickering between Lucy and Desi was noted. Because of their personal problems (and Desi spending more time trying to maintain the Desilu "empire"), the live studio audience was replaced with a laugh track by the final season. (Although both comedian Milton Berle and writer Bob Schiller stated in The Lucy Book by Geoffrey Mark Fidelman that for the ninth season premiere show, "Milton Hides Out at The Ricardos," a live audience was brought in for some of the scenes to give a sense of timing.) In the penultimate episode of the series, titled "The Ricardos Go to Japan," Lucy appeared on screen red-eyed due to her crying during the arguments between herself and Desi (although not seen on-camera due to the show being filmed in black and white).

In the making of the last episode, Ball and Arnaz did not speak directly to each other except when their characters were required to do so. The series filmed its final episode March 2, and the divorce proceedings starting the next day. In the final episode, Edie Adams chose to sing "That's All," later commenting that she personally chose the song, unaware of the magnitude of the Ball-Arnaz marital woes or the pending divorce, and Ball's look of anguish and sadness was obvious in the finished airing of the episode.

Critics have generally regarded the series as a rather pallid continuation of I Love Lucy, with not enough of the original show's brisk pace and memorable sketchwork, and an excessive use of celebrity guest-stars. Still, many fans enjoy the series due to the cast, which remained intact from the original. The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour is occasionally seen on nostalgia outlets like TV Land or in edited thirty-minute installments (beginning in 1987) under the title We Love Lucy, where stations run it directly after the sixth season of I Love Lucy. This allows them to have 26 additional "episodes" that run like a seventh season. Since The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour was comprised of only thirteen episodes spread over three seasons, all thirteen episodes were released in one DVD box collection.

The show is memorialized in the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Center in Jamestown, New York.

Cast

Actor/Character
Lucille Ball	Lucy Ricardo
Desi Arnaz	Ricky Ricardo
Vivian Vance	Ethel Mertz
William Frawley	Fred Mertz
Keith Thibodeaux credited as "Richard Keith"	"Little Ricky" Ricardo

Episodes

• List of The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour episodes

DVD release

CBS DVD released the entire series on DVD on March 13, 2007 in Region 1.

External links

• The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour at the Internet Movie Database
• The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour at TV.com
• Episode guide and descriptions for The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour
• The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour at TVLand.com