I Love Lucy’s Changes to TV Began With Its Controversial Casting

After 70+ years, it’s still hard to name any television show with the importance and influence of I Love Lucy. Not only was it the medium’s first certified monster hit — its second season still has the highest ratings average of all time — but it pioneered a number of production methods that remain industry standards today. That includes the three-camera technique that became a staple of network sitcoms for decades, the use of film instead of live broadcasting, and the invention of the rerun, which helped star Lucille Ball recover after famously giving birth.

However, I Love Lucy’s biggest contribution goes beyond ratings and television. Ball’s co-star and then-husband Desi Arnaz was Cuban-American in an era when racial segregation was codified law in many parts of the country. The studio didn’t want to depict a biracial couple on television, but the show fought for it and won. Considering how big I Love Lucy became, it took a bite out of widely accepted racist dogma and help pave the way for needed social change. The two stars used an unusual promotional tactic to make it happen.

Desi and Lucy’s Real-Life Marriage Was the Basis of I Love Lucy

Ball and Arnaz met on the set of 1940’s Too Many Girls, a musical comedy based on a popular Broadway play. They eloped soon thereafter and had been married for over a decade when I Love Lucy premiered. Ball had scored a big hit on radio with 1948’s My Favorite Husband, where she played a housewife who gets into comedic escapades very similar to I Love Lucy’s. CBS was eager to turn it into a television show, which Ball and Arnaz saw as a rare opportunity for them to work together.

The powers that be felt otherwise, as Ball explained in a 1958 article in the Saturday Evening Post. “The people there said the public wouldn’t believe I was married to Desi. He talked with a Cuban accent, and, after all, what typical American girl is married to a Latin?” That response demonstrates the kind of institutional racism that allows more overt bigotry to flourish (as well as the sheer hubris of telling a white woman married to a Latine man that white women didn’t marry Latines).

Desi and Lucy Went on Tour to Sell the Show

The couple responded by developing the project as a live vaudeville act and taking it on tour during the summer of 1950. Arnaz was a real-world bandleader — which became one of I Love Lucy‘s centerpieces — which they incorporated into the act, along with a number of comedy routines that later made their way to the show. The premise was the same, with Ball’s character eager to join her husband’s band and getting into all manner of comedic scrapes as a result.

The live act was a big hit, which convinced the studio that the TV show would work. Once the ratings came in, all questions about the couple’s racial status vanished. They were simply two people in love, and audiences couldn’t get enough. The pair divorced in 1960, as Arnaz was a notorious womanizer, and the show was partially an attempt to repair their marriage. Still, the couple remained influential in Hollywood for the rest of their lives. Ball assumed control of their studio, Desilu, after the divorce, and went on to produce the likes of the original Star Trek and the original Mission: Impossible.

None of it would have happened if social norms had prevailed. Indeed, the lengths the two had to go to sell a perfectly reasonable concept speaks to the systemic nature of prejudice at the time. No one expected the show to become an icon — Ball and Arnaz just wanted a mutual project. I Love Lucy affirmed what they both already knew — love is love — and quietly conveyed that to the rest of the country.