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2016's I Love Lucy Christmas Special


Harrison

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I hesitate to say the following because it may imply that it was downhill after (and she still had a dozen or so years of great performances in her) but "Gets in Pictures" has to be the pinnacle of I Love Lucy and it's episode #116 with another 86 Lucy Ricardo episodes ahead of her (I'm counting Lucy Ricardo on "Ann Sothern" and "Danny Thomas") What is amazing is that her heavy headdress/wobble bit looks like it was honed to perfection over a long period of trial and error practice, when in fact, she only had 2 days to work on this, simultaneously working on the rest of the episode. Does anyone have the script for this? I'd like to see what is written for the whole exchange with director Williams concerning "friends back home" because there seemed to be a lot of ad-libbing.
Two things I never noticed before: when the camera pans to Williams amidst the cameras saying "roll 'em", Desi/Ricky is standing with the group of technicians. And I never noticed Lucy's side-glance to the new lead girl as she plots to take the shot instead.  

"Well...he missed"  The split second between 'well' and 'he' is textbook for any actor studying comic timing of a line reading. 
I know they had to cut something but I did miss the bustle story, made all that much funnier by the way it's brought up.  Fred: "The funniest thing happened when we were leaving the wardrobe department". Ethel:  "I didn't think that was so funny".

 

I would suggest to CBS that next Christmas they run their new episode first and THEN the 1956 Christmas episode.

 

I'm not one who looks down on the Danny Thomas Lucy Show episode as a direct rip off of this episode.  Yes, she does the same stagger when she's wearing the building-substituting for headdress but Holy Cow! This is 10 years and almost 200 episodes later.  A lesser actress with fewer tricks would have trotted this bit out every third episode! 

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http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/friday-tv-ratings-vampire-diaries-dr-ken-blue-bloods-ncaa-football-dateline/

 

The I Love Lucy Christmas Special scored the highest rating of the night with 6.7 million viewers beating out ABC's 20/20 and Last Man Standing that drew 6.38 and 6.32 million viewers, respectively. However, in terms of the coveted 18-49 demographic it came in at 7th place (out of 13 contenders) with a 0.9 share. NCAA Football was 1st with 1.7 share, Dateline NBC and Shark Tank tied at 2nd with 1.2 share and 20/20, Last Man Standing, and Fox College Football pregame all tied at 4th place with 1.1 share. Of the three programs that CBS aired last night, it was the I Love Lucy Christmas Special that did the best in ratings and share.

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I'd forgotten per Ricky reading her postcards that Carolyn Appleby was once again referred to as Lillian...although she'd soon be Carolyn again when she stopped over in Hollywood for a visit! Do we know why the back and forth??

Yeah, this particular usage of the name Lillian was especially bizarre, given she'd been Carolyn for a few years by this point. Surely someone on set could've remembered the other name!

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