‘All it does is make us laugh and forget our own cares’
I Love Lucy and Three’s Company had very different reputations when it came to quality and class. But both were sitcom farces packed with misunderstandings and physical, slapstick comedy, which explains why Lucille Ball was a Three’s Company superfan. “It’s my kind of show,” she said, according to Come and Knock on Our Door: A Hers and Hers and Hist Guide to Three’s Company.
Ball offered to host a one-hour special called The Best of Three’s Company based on her love of the show and its star, John Ritter. It was a mutual admiration society, as seen in this over-the-top introduction to best-of clips. “Lucille Ball! You’re here! I’m standing in the same room with you. … I mean, you’re in the same room with me. … I mean, what an honor! The great Lucille Ball!” Ritter gushed.
It was a disconcerting sight. What the heck was Lucille Ball doing in Jack Tripper’s apartment? “I’m talking about Three’s Company and looking at some of the very funny things you people did,” she said before tossing to clips of Ritter getting hit in the face with whipped-cream pies.
For a show derided as more about jiggles than jokes, Ball’s public fandom was a gift. “I don’t think any show will be on the Olympian stature of I Love Lucy,” said Ritter. “But the fact that Lucy personally and physically endorsed the show on the retrospective sort of validated the show.”
Of course, some viewers and critics saw it the other way around — rather than Ball lifting up Three’s Company, some took shots at the comic actress and asked, “How dare she lower herself?”
Joyce DeWitt, who played Janet, thought Ball’s involvement was a “great compliment for everyone involved with the show.” Suzanne Somers, however, had mixed feelings. By this point, she was off the show, supplanted by multiple blonde replacements. Producers had to convince Somers and her team to allow them to use Chrissy clips in the retrospective. Somers was a Lucy fan, but she wasn’t happy with the special. “I was presented as just one of the girls who came through the door,” she complained. “I was insignificant. I watched for a while and turned it off.”
Ritter, on the other hand, loved it. His gushing over Ball on the special wasn’t an act — she was one of his comedy heroes. He got a chance to repay the favor a few years later by guesting on Ball’s final sitcom, Life With Lucy. “One of the great joys of my life,” Ritter said, “is when I worked with her.”
Again, the feeling was mutual. “You know what I like about this show?” Ball asked the studio audience when she entered the Three’s Company apartment. “It doesn’t try to change the world or solve any major problems. All it does is make us laugh and forget our own cares. That’s my kind of comedy.”
