70 Years Later, Television Still Owes It All to ‘I Love Lucy’

I Love Lucy invented television. Okay—I know that I just claimed not even two weeks ago that The Dick Van Dyke Show invented television 60 years ago, and here I am proclaiming that, in fact, television was invented by I Love Lucy 70 years ago. The truth is that neither of them literally invented television (shout out to John Logie Baird). Figuratively, The Dick Van Dyke Show pioneered the kind of natural, sharp storytelling and performance that we still recognize as television today. Also figuratively—but also kinda literally, because this can’t be simple!—one could say that I Love Lucy really did invent television when it debuted 70 years ago on October 15, 1951.

As innovative as The Dick Van Dyke show’s run was, it could run because I Love Lucy walked—or pratfall over an ottoman because I Love Lucy stomped on some grapes. The format within which The Dick Van Dyke Show existed, along with nearly every other situation comedy from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls to Cheers and Seinfeld to Netflix’s One Day at a Time and Pretty Smart, was literally—and I literally mean literally—invented by Desi Arnaz for I Love Lucy.

Television looked a lot different in 1951—mainly because it was brand new. In 1947, there was basically one television set for every 3000 people in America, and two of the big three—ABC and CBS—didn’t make the leap to television until 1948 (NBC started broadcasting in 1944). But by 1951, the number of sets in America had skyrocketed to roughly 12 million—or around one TV set for every 13 people in America. Americans coast to coast were tuned in just in time for I Love Lucy to invent television.

Before I Love Lucy made history, it was part of a history-making shift to the west. In the early days of TV, pretty much everything was beamed out live from New York City. That’s also where the vast majority of TV sets were located in the 1940s. But by the fall of 1951, a month before Lucy’s debut, the Associated Press syndicated a report from James R. Bacon titled “Hollywood Sure to Become Television Center of U.S.” Hollywood had long been home to the movies, and now television shows were heading West. Among the ones mentioned in the article was “the new Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz show”—and, as the report points out, this new show was being shot on film.

This is where history is made: I Love Lucy was filmed before a live studio audience. Every part of that phrase was groundbreaking in 1951. At the time, TV broadcasts were live. If producers wanted to air a show at a later date, or if Los Angeles stations wanted to air evening programming from New York on a delay, they had to rely on kinescopes—essentially cameras that filmed TV sets and produced recordings that could be shipped out and replayed later. The quality was understandably not great! Imagine if the only way for anyone outside of NYC to watch Saturday Night Live was to log onto Instagram and watch an Insta Live of a New Yorker holding their phone up to the TV. That’s kinescope.

Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s bandleader husband and I Love Lucy co-star, wanted his show shot on film like a motion picture. He was serious, too! So serious that he hired Oscar-winning cinematographer Karl Freund—the guy who shot f’ing Dracula and Metropolis!—to make I Love Lucy look like the best damn TV show to ever exist. Freund succeeded, as critics like the Valley Times’ Allen Rich praised the first episode as looking “just about perfect.” Oh—and because episodes were shot on film, that meant they could be re-aired with ease and quality at later dates. Yep, I Love Lucy invented the rerun, too.

Then there’s the other part of the phrase “I Love Lucy was filmed before a live studio audience”—the “live studio audience” part. I Love Lucy was the first situation comedy to be filmed—as in on film—in front of a live studio audience.

To accomplish this, Arnaz had a wall taken out of the newly christened Desilu studio and replaced it with 300 plush seats situated behind three cameras. This setup is one we take for granted nowadays, having seen it in behind-the-scenes footage as well as on-camera anytime a TV character gets a job on a sitcom (or gets trapped in a magical sitcom limbo realm). But at the time? It blew minds.

Columnist Erskine Johnson devoted his September 27, 1951 column to this totally wild TV setup, under the headline, “Lucille Ball TV Show Has Builtin Audience.” The fact that this TV show was letting 300 fans onto a Hollywood studio lot was a bold move, and the fact that the whole thing would be caught on film was even bolder. Another column by AP film writer Bob Thomas published on October 9 called I Love Lucy “an unusual operation. Some TV shows are telecast directly with an audience and others are filmed. But the Ball-Arnaz program is filmed with an audience.” And then Thomas goes into step-by-step detail about how this madness goes down. What’s most telling is how reporters and critics of 1951 don’t know what to call I Love Lucy. They call it a television movie or a motion picture—anything other than a TV show. At the time, a TV show was a comparatively ramshackle affair, and I Love Lucy was not that.

But pretty soon, all of TV would look like I Love Lucy. Every TV show from the past 70 years utilizes one of those three innovations—shooting on film, bringing in a live audience, and/or the rerun. Just look at the TV landscape of today, a crowded horizon of streaming services all built on the notion that people want to be able to rewatch television. Arnaz was essentially the first to predict people would want to do that.

There’s another groundbreaking part of “I Love Lucy was filmed before a live studio audience,” and it’s the first part. It’s the very title of the show. I Love Lucy—but who loves Lucy? Ricky Ricardo loves Lucy. A Cuban immigrant loves an all-American redhead.

I Love Lucy has been such an ingrained part of pop culture for 70 years that it is very easy to overlook the fact that I Love Lucy is about a marriage between an immigrant and an American. In fact, CBS initially didn’t want Arnaz to be on-camera at all. They wanted Richard Denning, Lucille Ball’s husband from her radio series, to play her TV husband. But Ball was so determined to get her husband on TV that the two of them (with the I Love Lucy writers-to-be) created an entire vaudeville show built around the IRL couple just to show CBS what was what. CBS eased up and Desi became Ricky.

When it debuted 70 years ago, television was a ragtag start-up medium that was intended to be disposable. It was temporary entertainment, captured in crude recordings if preserved at all. And then came I Love Lucy, a show that boldly proclaimed that television shows were worth preserving and remembering. Seven decades later, we can stream I Love Lucy—a show that is still hilarious, BTW—because Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball saw the future.

Stream I Love Lucy on Hulu

Stream I Love Lucy on Paramount+