Was Lucy's Popularity Dying?

[LittleRickyII]

Originally Posted by peppypacer

The show where she had the teenage daughter and young son and Vivian Vance had a son and they lived together was not bad. But apparently she was jealous of the attention Candy Moore was getting and wrote her out of the show and eventually shipped her tv son to military school and went solo until bringing in her own two kids in a later series.

Making up stuff? Elaborate on "the attention Candy Moore was getting." From the beginning, Candy Moore and the other kids on the show played minor characters. This show was created for Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance. The rest of the cast -- with the exception of Gale Gordon, who came later -- were props. Candy Moore was written out of the show for the same reason the two young male actors were written out of the show. (You think she was jealous of Ralph Hart and Jimmy Garrett, too?) Vivian Vance decided to quit the show at the end of the third season, in 1965. Consequently, Lucille Ball was considering ending the series. She was going to continue on with a brand-new series with Gale Gordon. A pilot had been filmed a year earlier, with Bob Hope as a guest star. But Desilu felt she should continue The Lucy Show in order to get at least get 100 episodes in the can (they only had 84 by the end of the '64-'65 season). One hundred is considered a magic number for the number of episodes needed for weekday syndicated reruns. Also, CBS did not want to her end The Lucy Show. They wanted her to somehow continue the series. Then Maury Thompson and Tommy Thompson came up with a concept where Lucy Carmichael moves to Los Angeles and has encounters with celebrities. Ms. Ball liked their idea and that pretty much settled it. Candy Moore, Ralph Hart and Jimmy Garrett only had a small role on the show in the beginning. By the third season, their roles had been greatly diminished and no longer appeared in most episodes. And with the new format, they would be needed even less. So they were written out.

[TMC]

This is likely going to be a rather controversial opinion but here it goes...Lucille Ball really didn't know how to evolve. Without Desi Arnez, there was no one really helping her choose material. She had gag writers on Here's Lucy. Her other shows had various combinations of her old writers who wrote basically old fashioned stuff she liked. Ball was not really funny herself and her persona wasn't that much different from the character she played in Stage Door.

[TV Guy]

She was a wonderful performer, but was not a guiding force creatively as Desi and Jess Oppenheimer had been on I Love Lucy. It's not coincidence that the first season of The Lucy Show is the best: Desi was still around for part of it to guide the show and coax the writers to do rewrites on their lesser efforts. Lucy should have gotten Jess back to produce the Lucy Show after Desi left.

[um]

Originally Posted by LittleRickyII

Making up stuff? Elaborate on "the attention Candy Moore was getting." From the beginning, Candy Moore and the other kids on the show played minor characters. This show was created for Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance. The rest of the cast -- with the exception of Gale Gordon, who came later -- were props. Candy Moore was written out of the show for the same reason the two young male actors were written out of the show. (You think she was jealous of Ralph Hart and Jimmy Garrett, too?) Vivian Vance decided to quit the show at the end of the third season, in 1965. Consequently, Lucille Ball was considering ending the series. She was going to continue on with a brand-new series with Gale Gordon. A pilot had been filmed a year earlier, with Bob Hope as a guest star. But Desilu felt she should continue The Lucy Show in order to get at least get 100 episodes in the can (they only had 84 by the end of the '64-'65 season). One hundred is considered a magic number for the number of episodes needed for weekday syndicated reruns. Also, CBS did not want to her end The Lucy Show. They wanted her to somehow continue the series. Then Maury Thompson and Tommy Thompson came up with a concept where Lucy Carmichael moves to Los Angeles and has encounters with celebrities. Ms. Ball liked their idea and that pretty much settled it. Candy Moore, Ralph Hart and Jimmy Garrett only had a small role on the show in the beginning. By the third season, their roles had been greatly diminished and no longer appeared in most episodes. And with the new format, they would be needed even less. So they were written out.

Interesting.
I have watched the different "Lucy" shows that existed throughout the 1960s into the early 1970s and I was very young but I noticed that the "The Lucy Show" had different "background characters" from "I Love Lucy" or "Here's Lucy." The ones with Desi Arnaz I knew must have been made before I was born and were always in reruns. I remember the show which featured Lucy and Vivian as characters with young kids, and I recall one episode in which Lucy was chosen to be the umpire at one of her son's baseball games and she interfered with the game by holding one kid from the other team by the legs as he tried to catch the ball or run to a base. I am not sure what Lucy's character's last name in this series , or Vivian's.
I don't have recollections about how those child characters were phased out or written out of the show before the show ended. I am surprised that in one of the Lucy shows before "Here's Lucy" Lucy was depicted as having a young daughter. Or that is what I best understand of what it says in your post. I don't recall ever seeing episodes in any of the shows in which she had a daughter other than "Kim" in the very final Lucy series.

Can anyone tell me how to find some general information about the different Lucy shows and what regular characters were in each?
Also anyone know about the names of each episode in each, at least the episodes in the Lucy shows that came after "The Lucy and Desi Comedy Hour"?
I would like to know about that episode in which Lucy was umpire at her young son's baseball game, if anyone else recalls that one.

[DJM77]

Originally Posted by um

I don't recall ever seeing episodes in any of the shows in which she had a daughter other than "Kim" in the very final Lucy series.

Are you aware that Lucille Ball had a short-lived sitcom in 1986 called Life With Lucy?

[um]

Originally Posted by DJM77

Are you aware that Lucille Ball had a short-lived sitcom in 1986 called Life With Lucy?

I recall the sitcom name "Life With Lucy" but I don't recall it was in the mid 1980s. Lucielle Ball died in 1989. How did she have enough energy only 3 years before her passing to do one more sitcom?

[DJM77]

Originally Posted by um

I recall the sitcom name "Life With Lucy" but I don't recall it was in the mid 1980s. Lucielle Ball died in 1989. How did she have enough energy only 3 years before her passing to do one more sitcom?

I don't know, but it happened. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090473/

[MrMattyMatt]

Originally Posted by peppypacer

Why did Lucy always scream her lines in her post I Love Lucy shows? Did she think the mikes weren't too good or something?

I watched an interview with someone (can't recall who exactly) who guest starred one of the post ILL shoes and he said that she yelled at him for not saying his lines loud enough. She felt that the actors needed to speak loud enough for the studio audience to hear them so they would get the laughs. This is probably why she sounds like she's screaming most of the time. I wonder what the sound engineers felt about that. I guess they knew better than to critisize her.

[PracTz]

Originally Posted by Mr. Television

I doubt she was was jealous of the attention Candy was getting. I don't think the kids had that many episodes centered around them after the first season.

True, but what's surprising is that, in spite of using them less and less as the series went on, all three performers professed being shocked when Lucy decided to dump their characters after three years. I have to wonder why Ralph Hart (Sherman Begley) in particular would have thought he'd have been able to stay on with Viv being used less and less due to Miss Vance openly chomping on the bit and trying to have more input. Did he truly believe there'd have been any reason for Lucy Carmichael to have had anything to do with Sherman Begley if Viv was no longer going to be a regular? I can only think of maybe two or three times in which Lucy and Sherman had direct dialogue with each other in those three seasons as opposed to him interacting with Viv or Jerry and Lucy getting into it with the other. I get that the three younger performers got along great with each other and maybe considered the crew their family but considering how Lucy was barely using them in the last year or so even before Viv's permanent departure as a co-star, I don't see how they could have been surprised that they were let go.