The CBS series premiered on Oct. 1, 1962—without a pilot.
On October 1, 1962, The Lucy Show made its debut on CBS. The sitcom starred Lucille Ball as Lucy Carmichael, a widowed mother of two kids (Candy Moore, Jimmy Garrett) who shared a house with her divorced pal Vivian (Vivian Vance) and her son Sherman (Ralph Hart).
The Lucy Show was Ball’s follow-up to I Love Lucy, but with no Desi by her side—at least not on camera. Instead, Ball’s ex-husband and I Love Lucy co-star, Desi Arnaz, was an executive producer on the show for Desilu Productions.
While it aired for six seasons, The Lucy Show was reportedly never meant to be a long-term series. According to Geoffrey Mark Fidelman’s The Lucy Book: A Complete Guide to Her Five Decades on Television, “it was never intended for this show to go beyond one TV season. “ Instead, The Lucy Show was “a stop-gap measure for the studio” to get CBS to invest in other Desilu productions. The Lucy Show was picked by the network without a pilot.
In 1962, Ball teased the new series in a promo video shot in her dressing room. “Oh, my left eye needs a little more mascara,” she said. “You see, it’s going on television. My right eye is too. I’m getting made up for a scene in my new show, which will appear on CBS Monday nights, and my good friend Vivian Vance will be with me, too. I hope you’ll join us.”
Fans did join them for wacky antics that put Ball and Vance’s physical comedy skills to the test. On the Season 1 episode “Lucy and Her Electric Mattress,” Ball, then 51 years old, was required to use stilts.
“The day they brought those stilts on set, I hadn’t been on a pair since I was nine or 10 years old,” Ball said in an interview with the Winston-Salem Journal, per Catchy Comedy. “The show is more physical now and also tougher, but it’s more fun. I love physical bits, and it makes for good comedy.”
While Ball and Vance’s bits are some of the most memorable scenes from the series, The Lucy Show underwent several odd incarnations during its six-season run.
After the original format featured Ball and Vance as two friends raising their kids together in Danfield, New York, the show began to segue to Ball’s character’s run-ins with banker Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon), who held the keys to her trust fund.
By 1965, not only did Vance exit the show, but the kids were written out of the series under the guise that they went away to school. At that point, Lucy Carmichael began to work as Mr. Mooney’s secretary, and the series was set at the bank. In a bizarre twist for the show’s final seasons, both Lucy and Mr. Mooney moved to California to work at another bank—and the widowed mom of two’s former life in Danfield was never talked about again.
Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, looked back on The Lucy Show in an interview with Tony Maietta. In the interview, she recalled that it was a little strange to see her father on set as a producer on the show following her parents’ divorce.
“My father really loved my mother and especially loved her talent and wanted to see that the next show got launched properly,” she explained of The Lucy Show.
