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What episodes are you watching on "Here's Lucy"?


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Season Three "Mini Marathon"

  1. Lucy Meets the Burtons
  2. Lucy the Skydiver
  3. ...Sammy Davis Jr.
  4. ...Drum Contest (Buddy Rich)
  5. ...the Crusader (a personal favorite as it never gets old! Charles Nelson Reilly's hilarious guest star warranted a repeat visit, wonder why it never happened??)
  6. ...the Coed
  7. ...the American Mother 
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I've been putting together little videos for Carole Cook, moments from her career, to keep them entertained while confined.

I put together all her  episode intros and God! she's funny.  Most of the intros done by others are entertaining but are usually straight-forward plot descriptions with a little trivial.  Carole goes off-script.  About "Part-Time Wife", she says "Lucy pretends to be pregnant", then pauses and adds "That's what we call a stretch".   She does the intro to "Crusader" and mentioned it's the best of the series (I believe that opinion was scripted and on prompter).  Fidelman said that too.  Do others think so?   I don't hate it but I don't particularly like it either.  I like CN Reilly in it.   HE should have been on Life with Lucy!

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On ‎7‎/‎7‎/‎2020 at 8:17 PM, Neil said:

I've been putting together little videos for Carole Cook, moments from her career, to keep them entertained while confined.

I put together all her  episode intros and God! she's funny.  Most of the intros done by others are entertaining but are usually straight-forward plot descriptions with a little trivial.  Carole goes off-script.  About "Part-Time Wife", she says "Lucy pretends to be pregnant", then pauses and adds "That's what we call a stretch".   She does the intro to "Crusader" and mentioned it's the best of the series (I believe that opinion was scripted and on prompter).  Fidelman said that too.  Do others think so?   I don't hate it but I don't particularly like it either.  I like CN Reilly in it.   HE should have been on Life with Lucy!

The "Part-Time Wife Mother-To-Be" episode would have been better suited for the Kim Carter character as she was of child-bearing age. Moreover, that would have made a great comedy bit/episode for Lucie Arnaz to do. Too bad when the writers wrote this episode they didn't have Kim Carter/Lucie Arnaz in mind. What a missed opportunity!

"Crusader" was a very good episode. I would definitely include it in the "Best of Here's Lucy" list. Great script all the way around! I remember being very impressed and entertained during my first time of watching it.

 

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  • 1 month later...

In the last week or so ago:

"Lucy Gives Eddie Albert the Old Song and Dance" (#128) ... awesome to see old Lucy players in this one; however, the writing is not so great. So much of this episode gets built up that leads to a climax of just a song and dance number that Lucy and Eddie Albert do. That's about it. Nothing spectacular.

"Lucy, the Peacemaker" (#122) ... this episode could easily be a Lucy-less one. The plot literally revolves around the guest stars and it's Lucy who is the one that plays second fiddle. Not to mention that no one in the Here's Lucy cast (besides Lucy) is in the episode.

"Lucy, the Shopping Expert" (#20) ... fun viewing. The birds and bees talk is a riot. And Lucy trying to show Kim how to shop is hilarious!

"A Date For Lucy" (#18) ... not too bad. It is nice to see Cesar Romero, a former Lucy guest, return to a Lucy program. 

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1 hour ago, Harrison said:

In the last week or so ago:

"Lucy Gives Eddie Albert the Old Song and Dance" (#128) ... awesome to see old Lucy players in this one; however, the writing is not so great. So much of this episode gets built up that leads to a climax of just a song and dance number that Lucy and Eddie Albert do. That's about it. Nothing spectacular.

 

I recently watched this one as well.  I wonder if Lucy's "Mame" costar Robert Preston was ever considered for Albert's part. During the ladies' discussion at the office, it is mentioned Albert had appeared in "The Music Man," for which Preston was well known.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I watched a handful of fourth season episodes yesterday including a favorite, "Kim Moves Out."  I wanted to watch "Lucy's Replacement," but it's among the batch of episodes that no longer "free" on Amazon Prime.  These episodes appear to be viewable for an additional fee.  The fee episodes appear to be randomly selected.  

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 9/13/2020 at 8:48 AM, RodMcK1 said:

I wonder if Lucy's "Mame" costar Robert Preston was ever considered for Albert's part. 

That would have been a GREAT idea.  I have nothing specific to back this up but I always got the impression that Lucy & Preston didn't see "eye to eye" during Mame. In Mame interviews, I don't ever remember her mentioning him. 

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Quote

 

"Lucy Gives Eddie Albert the Old Song and Dance" (#128) ... awesome to see old Lucy players in this one; however, the writing is not so great. So much of this episode gets built up that leads to a climax of just a song and dance number that Lucy and Eddie Albert do. That's about it. Nothing spectacular.

I saw this episode today, and it wasn't that great either. But to be honest, I think they did way too many of these musical episodes in the later years to begin with. Aside from a handful episodes (i.e. Lucy and the Generation Gap, which is really only interesting because of the sets and because Lucie and Desi are in it too,) I tend to skip past them. 

With regard to the Eddie Albert episode: I know 1973 was a different time, but did anyone else think it was weird that Lucy just went up to Eddie Albert's front door to ask him to be in the show? I know Lucy interacting with celebrities had been a staple on Ball's shows since the I Love Lucy days - but at least back on I Love Lucy, Ricky was in show business, so it  made sense that the Lucy character might have interactions with his co-workers. I couldn't imagine Lucy Ricardo ever walking up to a celebrity's front door to ask them for a favor, the way Lucy Carter does with Eddie Albert, unless she actually lived next door to them (i.e. Tallulah Bankhead in The Celebrity Next door.)**

** = And at that point, Lucy and Ricky lived in a relatively affluent suburb in Westport, and one might expect that a Broadway stage actress, such as Bankhead, might actually move in next door. And to Desi and the writers' credit, Lucy Ricardo invited Tallulah over for dinner, established a friendship, and *then* asked her to be in the PTA benefit. It didn't seem as illogical or out of the blue. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I needed a break from work today (I've been working from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic,) so I watched Lucy, The Matchmaker from the first season. This is one of my favorite episodes from the early years. Particularly during the first few seasons, Lucy and Harry were often written as being at each other's throats - so anytime the show got away from that, it was a nice change of pace. And this was a pretty funny script, too, by Milt Josefsberg's standards. 

Vivian Vance looked a little "off," facially, in this episode. I remember reading that Vance had a second facelift in the late '60s, and I wondered if it might have been before this episode. She still looked beautiful, but her face definitely looked pulled/tightened compared to how it looked in The Lucy Show. Nonetheless, I never would have guessed that Viv was pushing 60 at the time this episode was filmed - she easily could have passed for a decade younger. 

The final scene at the dinner party was fun, even though it seemed odd that Viv would ever be attracted to a miserly tightwad like Harry. Even more so since the Vivian Jones character was written to be more like Vivian Bagley than Ethel Mertz here. I could imagine Ethel Mertz putting up with Fred/Harry's foolishness, but Vivian Bagley certainly wouldn't. 

All that being said, I would definitely put this in the top 15-20 episodes of Here's Lucy that I've seen, for sure. 

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Yes, it's likely Viv had another facelift before that episode. She was on Virginia Graham's Girl Talk show around that time talking about it. Both Vivian and Mary Jane were remarkably open about cosmetic surgery for the time period. That combined with the black eyeshadow she wore in the episode and a different shade of hair color gave her a slightly different look. 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I watched "Lucy at the Drive-In Movie" from the second season today. 

I'm not a fan of a lot of the Milt Josefsberg penned episodes, but this one was fun, albeit very unrealistic. The Lucy Carter character, as written by Josefsberg, is very tacky and dumb.** (For example, it's hard to believe that Lucy wouldn't know how to use a speaker at a drive-in movie. Or that Kim wouldn't have recognized Lucy and Harry in their hippie costumes.) But once I moved past all that, the script itself was amusing. The "twist" ending, where Lucy is upset that Craig's date's parents followed *him* to the drive-in movie as well, was funny. 

If Vivian Vance was still around, I almost think this could have been a fun plotline for them to do together, with Viv taking on Harry's role as Lucy's co-conspirator at the drive-in. 

Overall, I'd give this one a 6.5/10.

** = When I watch the later episodes, penned by Bob and Madelyn, it's like night and day in terms of Lucy's characterization. I don't know if Bob and Madelyn did as well without Jess or Desi around to coax them into better rewrites, but Lucy Carter is much more like Lucy Ricardo in the later episodes. 

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I recently watched a few first season episodes that I had not watched in a long time including "Lucy and the Ex Con" and "Lucy Goes on Strike."  Now I remember why I have passed over these so many times.  They are not ridiculously bad like "Lucy's Safari" or "Lucy and the Gold Rush," but they have very few good moments.  I believe "Strike" was the only script from Mel Diamond and Al Schwartz.  I suppose it was another one of those cheap, uninspired "off the market" scripts used 

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Sometime in the Fall 2020:

"Lucy Goes on Strike" (#16)

"Lucy's Safari" (#22)

"Lucy Helps Craig Get His Driver's License" (#24)

"Lucy and the Indian Chief" (#27)

"Lucy Runs the Rapids" (#28)

"Lucy and Harry's Tonsils" (#29)

"Lucy, the Cement Worker" (#34)

"Lucy and Johnny Carson" (#35)

"Lucy and the Generation Gap" (#36)

"Lucy, the Crusader" (#51)

"Lucy and Ma Parker" (#56)

"Lucy Stops a Marriage" (#59)

 

 

December 26th, 2020:

"Lucy and the Great Airport Chase" (#11). (Followed by The Lucy Show episodes, "Lucy Is a Kangaroo for a Day" & "Lucy Buys a Sheep" ). A favorite of mine. Watched it with my niece. She seemed to enjoy it.

 

Last night (12/31/20):

"Lucy's Bonus Bounces" (#86)

"Lucy and David Frost Go Night-Night" (#87)

The first one was great watching Lucy, Kim and Mary-Jane all plotting together "against" Harrison. The second one was just so-so. I would say it's almost a remake of The Lucy Show episode, "Lucy Flies to London", with David Frost taking the role of Mr. Mooney on the airplane. However, it had a weak ending and just wasn't done well here.

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  • 2 months later...

The final episode "Lucy Fights the System", a great showcase for Lucie/Kim.  And peppered with such great supporting players: Mary Treen, of course, Barbara Morrision, pie throwing Harry Holcome, John "Red" Fox (Danfield's Officer Wilcox), Eddie Quillen, Sid&Vanda and others I recognize but don't know names.  Usually crowd scenes on HL feature people that can't even act as in "Milton Berle/Life of Party".   To spare expenses, I figure.  Maybe by 1974, LBP had made up the lost revenue going over budget on the "Burtons" show.  A convenient excuse for Gary to pinch pennies, something I seriously doubt. 

Kudos to Jack Donahue for the deft pie throwing direction and choreography.  Usually shots are framed lazily and give away what's going to happen.  Example: Before Lucy throws Eva Gabor's necklace out the hospital window, director cuts to an awkward looking wide shot which telegraphs the bit in advance.   But here Donahue does a quick pan from 2-shot of Harry Holcome and Jack Collins (with Gale out of the shot) and follows the pie to Gale's face.   It's the perfect ending to the series.  Gale's extended reaction is priceless.  They must have planned this as the finale though I read somewhere that it wasn't the last one filmed.

A couple of things: if Jack Collins has "just turned 40", so have I!  I like that they use actual restaurant terms like "the deuce table" to indicate a 2-seater.  You wouldn't have heard any acknowledgment of how old Lucy & Harry have become even 2 seasons previous ("There are people who won't do business with us because of OUR AGE").  

And no one told writer Bob O'Brien that "the kids" don't wear jeans, faded or otherwise, when they go surfing!

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  • 1 month later...

Thanks to a VPN and Tubi, I’m able to watch this show for the first time in nearly a decade!

Lucy & Lawrence Welk - Viv gets some of her funniest ever lines in this instalment. And it’s wonderful seeing her and Mary Jane together again. That hadn’t happened since the Danfield/Audrey Simmons era, and even MJ gets to do more comedy than usual. God bless Lawrence, but the wax sculpture has more personality than the real one.

Lucy is Really in a Pickle - It’s no Vitametavegamin, but the faces she makes when attempting to eat the pickles are very funny. I know her filling them with fudge is played for comedy, but it also shows an intelligence that’s often lacking in her later characterisations. She found a solution which allowed her to perform as expected. Effective advertising, too - I cracked open a jar of pickles midway through. No fudge required.

Lucy’s Big Break - I’d completely forgotten Lloyd Bridges was in this one. And I never realised before that the “mhmm” lady was Dorothy Konrad of the barbershop quartet. Mary Wickes is a total scene stealer as the nurse. Alan Oppenheimer’s role must’ve been compensation for Lucie’s pilot not selling. 

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On 5/4/2021 at 7:10 PM, Mot Morenzi said:

Thanks to a VPN and Tubi, I’m able to watch this show for the first time in nearly a decade!

Lucy & Lawrence Welk - Viv gets some of her funniest ever lines in this instalment. And it’s wonderful seeing her and Mary Jane together again. That hadn’t happened since the Danfield/Audrey Simmons era, and even MJ gets to do more comedy than usual. God bless Lawrence, but the wax sculpture has more personality than the real one.

Lucy is Really in a Pickle - It’s no Vitametavegamin, but the faces she makes when attempting to eat the pickles are very funny. I know her filling them with fudge is played for comedy, but it also shows an intelligence that’s often lacking in her later characterisations. She found a solution which allowed her to perform as expected. Effective advertising, too - I cracked open a jar of pickles midway through. No fudge required.

Lucy’s Big Break - I’d completely forgotten Lloyd Bridges was in this one. And I never realised before that the “mhmm” lady was Dorothy Konrad of the barbershop quartet. Mary Wickes is a total scene stealer as the nurse. Alan Oppenheimer’s role must’ve been compensation for Lucie’s pilot not selling. 

Agree, Brian, with all your observations here and just further "ammo" to me that the return of Bob & Madelyn to the writers room late in "Here's" significantly boosted the quality of their respective episodes (here "Pickle" and "Big Break"). Oh...what might have been! :HALKING:

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  • 3 months later...

I re-watched "Lucy, the Shopping Expert" this afternoon. I know other people, i.e. Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, really like this one, but I'm not a huge fan. Milt Josefsberg tended to write the Lucy character as being dumb and tacky (as opposed to sly, manipulative, and cunning,) and this episode is no exception. The scenes with Lucy messing up the melon display, eating vegetables without paying for them, and dropping things on the ground are annoying, rather than amusing. 

Like many of the first season episodes, this show feels more like a collection of scenes - as opposed to one unified episode. Individual parts of the episode (i.e. Gale Gordon's "birds and the bees" bit) are funny, but they didn't seem to come together as a whole for me. 

 

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16 hours ago, teenageluminary said:

I re-watched "Lucy, the Shopping Expert" this afternoon. I know other people, i.e. Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, really like this one, but I'm not a huge fan. Milt Josefsberg tended to write the Lucy character as being dumb and tacky (as opposed to sly, manipulative, and cunning,) and this episode is no exception. The scenes with Lucy messing up the melon display, eating vegetables without paying for them, and dropping things on the ground are annoying, rather than amusing. 

Like many of the first season episodes, this show feels more like a collection of scenes - as opposed to one unified episode. Individual parts of the episode (i.e. Gale Gordon's "birds and the bees" bit) are funny, but they didn't seem to come together as a whole for me. 

 

I do like this one a lot.  Aside from its comedic worth, it employs an "A-story" and a "B-story," which became much more common on other shows many years later.  I wish it had been employed more on "Here's Lucy."

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Here's Lucy premiere Episode 1 "Mod Mod Lucy".  The introduction of the kids: they're OK, if a little over-the top-hammy in their line readings.  The script is fine, by Here's Lucy standards, with the best line being "Does Mahalia Jackson go surfing before a concert?".    But the "You'll have your vocalist....Sonny?  Meet Cher" line that ends the 2nd act promises us some comedy in the 3rd act.  Instead what we get is Lucy's first on-series dubbed singing of "All Alone", composed by every teenager's favorite Irving Berlin.  It's not challenging vocally so I don't know why a dubber was necessary.  Nobody has yet confirmed who the ghost-singer is.  It's definitely not Carole Cook.  Some have suggested it was Lucie herself.  Maybe. "All Alone" segues in that trusted Here's Lucy stand-by "I Know a Place" with the teens joining in with precision("ish") choreography.  Lucy performs her limber dance moves admirably, but where is the comedy?  Why not a Mumu Yo Quiro attempt at lipping to Kim's practice tape?  Or something else besides this rather overlong dance number, for which I blame just plain lazy writing.   When Here's Lucy involved "typical teens", it could be embarrassing as it is here.  Interesting that Doris Singleton's (addressed by Harry as "Miss Singleton" and simply "Doris" in the credits. I mean, couldn't these writers have come up with a character name?) role was dropped--she and Lucy share no screen time-- because we could have had some good Ricardo-Appleby rivalry.  I wonder if Doris figured in to some of the early proposed plots.  Some of the best Lucy Shows from the first two season were those that featured that outer circle of friends: Mary Wickes, Carole Cook, Dorothy Konrad, Kathleen Freeman and the most prominent Mary Jane as Audrey Simmons.   Except for the two appearances of Mary Wickes as Isabel, Lucy Carter was virtually friendless until the fanfare-less reappearance of Mary Jane (evidently Miss Lewis got tired of waiting on Lucy Carmichael's doorstep for her return).  

Bob&Madelyn made the same mistake with The Mothers In Law as they did creating  Life with Lucy, colorless adult children and no steady cohorts for Eve/Kaye or Lucy, but at least Eve & Kaye had each other.  Lucy seemed adamant there would be no Viv replacement, but Here's (and LWL) sure would have benefited by a group of semi-regular peers, woman Lucy could conspire with or against.  Rumor has it that Viv was approached about returning for Here's, but I haven't confirmed that.  Was LBP too cheap to expand their cast beyond the four of them?  If so, too bad. (And with Lucie and Desi getting meager scale, there should have been cast money left over).  I much preferred the Lucy-Harry relationship later in the run, where there was less bickering (which sometimes bordered on overt hatred, sometimes crossed it), usually from a B&M script.  Ski Lift/Dinah, HC-Male Nurse, Kim Moves Out, Wandering Mother & NG as RN are great examples.   I find it amusing that for "Milton Berle/Life of Party", it's implied that Saturday nights are regularly shared by Lucy, Mary Jane and HARRY, who normally doesn't like either of them.   In defense of the Here's Lucy premiere, it was about as good as 1968 sitcoms got, but disappointing in that they missed the chance to return to a format that involved closeness of a family we actually cared about.  The 68-69 Best Comedy nominees were three rather tired long-running series: Get Smart, Bewitched and that insomnia-curing Family Affair, along with two newbies that weren't exactly laughfests: Julia & (the cancelled) Ghost & Mrs. Muir.   Get Smart, also cancelled, was the winner.  Both Muir & Smart were picked up by other networks for one more season, then scuttled for good while Here's Lucy went on and on, well into the 70s relevant comedy period. 

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I have the original script for Mod, Mod Lucy. In the original script, after the dance number, Lucy as Kim talks with Harry and the Caldwells. The Caldwells compliment her and Harry tells “Kim” he is giving her a bonus… and it’s coming out of her mother’s salary. 

In the script, secretary “Doris Singleton” is named “Carole Elkins,” which always made me wonder if Ms. Cook was the initial casting idea.  

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On 9/11/2021 at 12:56 PM, HarryCarter said:

I have the original script for Mod, Mod Lucy. In the original script, after the dance number, Lucy as Kim talks with Harry and the Caldwells. The Caldwells compliment her and Harry tells “Kim” he is giving her a bonus… and it’s coming out of her mother’s salary. 

In the script, secretary “Doris Singleton” is named “Carole Elkins,” which always made me wonder if Ms. Cook was the initial casting idea.  

That's interesting.   Perhaps Miss Elkins could have been providing Lucy's singing voice backstage only to be taken away mid-song because her daughter was giving birth.  Other than the Caldwell exchange, did the script outline anything in the last act except for "Lucy sings and dances"?

From 68-69, of the 20 sitcoms on the air, Here's Lucy was the only one still remaining in the 73-74 season.  If, as many do, you count The Lucy Show & Here's Lucy as one run, it must hold the record for a sitcom: (or any show) spending 10 years in the top 10, holding every position except #5, #7 and (damn you, Laugh In!) #1. 

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