Lucille Ball was the biggest star on television during the six-season run of her 1950s sitcom, I Love Lucy. The series, about a wacky housewife and her Cuban bandleader husband (Desi Arnaz) was an immediate hit when it debuted in October 1951 and was a top-three show for its entire original run on CBS, per research compiled by EBSCO.
But Ball, who died in 1989, wasn’t a fan of some of the earliest episodes of the CBS sitcom that later showed her character gathering chocolates off a conveyor belt and stomping grapes in Italy.
“I don’t like some of the shows that I look at,” Ball said during a vintage interview with The Roanoke Times, per MeTV. “Some of the old I Love Lucy’s are silly.”
“Sometimes, I study them and enjoy them and wish I’d done it differently a lot of times – most of the time – but very few I really laugh at,” the comedy legend also admitted. “The ones we made when we were just starting, they grate me a little.”
Ball added that she loved her later show, Here’s Lucy, which she did with her real-life kids, Lucie and Desi Jr. The series aired on CBS from 1968 to 1974 and featured Ball’s latest Lucy character as a widow living in Los Angeles and working at her brother-in-law’s (Gale Gordon) employment agency.
Here’s Lucy was Ball’s third CBS sitcom. After her divorce from Arnaz, she starred in The Lucy Show with her former I Love Lucy co-star Vivian Vance. The twosome played single mom roommates Lucy Carmichael and Vivian Bagley. It went on to become a hit, airing for six seasons just as I Love Lucy did.
But Ball initially had big concerns about the series, without her Desi by her side.
According to Catchy Comedy, in a 1962 interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Ball admitted that she had concerns that the public wouldn’t want to see her and Vance without their TV husbands. “I think they are going to miss Ricky and Fred. After all those years,” Ball said in the interview just after the show’s debut. “But I hope and pray they’ll like the show enough and that’s funny enough to help them accept us without the husbands.”
“I’m back playing the character I know best and like best – Lucy,” she added. “Before, we were always being threatened by our husbands – we were always doing kooky things so that Ricky or Fred wouldn’t find something out. Now we’re substituting other kinds of threats – weather, lack of dates, our kids.”
Ball added that while the cast and crew were “all pretty nervous during the first show,” they smoothed things out “pretty well.”
This story was originally reported by Parade on Oct 19, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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