Memories of My Misspent Youth: Life With Lucy
When nostalgia for the Golden Age of Television goes horribly awry.
It is possible to make and release a movie with a small crew, and no studio interference. You’ll likely end up with a hilarious disaster, like The Room or the entire cinematic oeuvre of Neil Breen, but it can, in the most basic sense of the phrase, be done.
Launching a TV show, however, requires multiple hands on deck, every step of the way. It’s a long, elaborate process to pitch, write, film, produce, promote, and air a show. There are numerous opportunities for someone to say “Wait, that’s not a good idea,” or “Perhaps we should try something different,” or “This is a fucking nightmare.” Yet, as many failed sitcoms have illustrated, either nobody speaks up when those opportunities arise, or, more likely, no one listens to them.
On paper, Lucille Ball making a TV comeback was a perfectly fine idea. It had been more than ten years since Here’s Lucy ended, and Ball had spent much of that time mostly just appearing on talk shows, sharing tales of old Hollywood in her signature raspy voice. But thanks mostly to The Cosby Show, sitcoms suddenly meant big bucks for television producers again, and Aaron Spelling, despite having already earned enough money to build a 123-room house for four people, wanted a piece of that for himself. He proposed 1986’s Life With Lucy to Ball, who was initially reluctant, until Spelling agreed to give her complete creative control over it.
What did that mean? Exactly what it sounds like: Ball’s husband, Gary Morton, despite knowing nothing about television production, was given an executive producer credit (and, incredibly, was paid $50,000 more per episode than Ball for his questionable services). In addition, Ball brought in her own writing team, and demanded that Gale Gordon, her comic foil since The Lucy Show, be added to the cast (Gordon himself refused to come on board until he was promised to be paid for a full 22 episode run, even if only one made it to air). She even insisted that the network hire her sound man from the I Love Lucy days, even though he was nearly 80 years old and hard of hearing.
It was certainly a kind and noble gesture for Lucy to ensure that her old cast and crew still got work in an increasingly youth-oriented industry. One can hope that it was that kindness that made people outside of Ball’s immediate circle reluctant to point out areas where Life With Lucy could use a little work. Regardless, someone at ABC was so certain it was going to be a smash that it went to air without a pilot, or even test screenings. It was a cringing debacle, the failure of which left Lucille Ball so dispirited that she all but retired from show business after that.
Life With Lucy repeats the standard Lucy formula, in that a lovable scatterbrain named Lucy wreaks havoc upon everyone around her. Here, Ball plays Lucy Barker, a recent widow who inherits her late husband’s half of a hardware business. Rather than make the reasonable decision to continue living comfortably on the profits from the store, she decides that she’s going to start overseeing the day-to-day operations, despite not knowing anything about hardware, let alone running a business.
This means she’ll have to work closely with her husband’s partner, Curtis (Gale Gordon), who despises her for reasons which are never quite clear, except perhaps because she’s a kooky free spirit, and he looks and acts as if someone is constantly farting in his presence. Wanting to be closer to her grandchildren (one of whom is played by future indie rock queen Jenny Lewis), Lucy moves in her with her daughter, who just happens to be married to Curtis’s son. Not wanting his grandchildren to be exposed to such a negative influence as Lucy, Curtis also moves in with the family.
Exhausted yet? Well, that’s just the premise of the show itself, we haven’t even gotten to the quipping, the celebrity guest appearances, and the endless slapstick comedy.
In the second episode, John Ritter, playing himself, drops in to Lucy’s hardware store. Lucy is so overwhelmed by his presence that she accidentally injures him, several times. Lucy is a human wrecking ball, and even when she tries to help, she just makes things worse. Nevertheless (and inexplicably), John agrees to recover at her home, where Lucy force-feeds him a dish she calls “health in a bowl,” consisting of wheat germ, tofu, and sauerkraut juice.
By this point, while one assumes Lucy’s antics are supposed to be fun and wacky, she comes off as a frighteningly pushy old lady who doesn’t know when to quit, a sledgehammer away from being a senior living community Annie Wilkes. Later in the episode, she interrupts John’s play rehearsal, and manipulates her way into replacing his co-star. Does she clumsily ruin the play, physically assaulting John several more times in the process? You bet she does. Does John, who has sustained the following injuries:
a smashed right hand
a smashed left hand
a sprained ankle
a cracked rib
a bump on the head
inhaling a foreign object
come to find joy in Lucy’s behavior? You bet he does, and the episode ends with them laughing and hugging.
Earlier in the review, I suggested that merely reading the premise of Life With Lucy could make one exhausted. “Exhausting” is the best word I can use to describe Life With Lucy overall. Everything is done in a very big, theatrical way, as evidenced in every single character reacting to John Ritter’s presence with hysterical shrieks, like Ed Sullivan’s audience during the Beatles’ first U.S. appearance. The slapstick humor is drawn out to punishing lengths, with it taking more than five minutes just to get an injured Ritter out of the hardware store, as Lucille Ball and Gale Gordon mug and shout over each other.
Of course, the studio audience, as it’s their dedicated purpose, howls with laughter at every line reading, every unnecessarily broad reaction, and every pratfall. You wouldn’t think that John Ritter merely saying he’s looking for doorknobs is hilarious, but the audience reacts to it like it’s a punchline to a joke that was later edited out before broadcast.
While Aaron Spelling lost nothing from this fiasco, Lucille Ball was crushed by the bad reviews, most of which focused on her advancing age. It would be inaccurate to say that that isn’t at least a small part of the problem with Life With Lucy. There was simply no reason that Ball, a beloved elder stateswoman of television comedy, had to still work herself into a sweat-soaked frenzy to get a laugh when she could have given ABC its own version of The Golden Girls instead.
Considering that she was at the helm of every creative decision made for the show, evidently Ball felt that audiences wouldn’t want to see her in any guise but the stuffing her mouth full of chocolates, falling off a ladder Lucy, even at well past retirement age. The fault here lies with whoever it was who told her she was right.