The Lucy Show - The Official Fourth Season DVD Review

[TJ]

Lucy is on the move in The Lucy Show - The Official Fourth Season! Lucy Carmichael (Lucille Ball) and Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon) move from Danville to California (leaving Viv behind, and leaving son Jerry in a California military academy) in this season of change. No longer is Lucy just a domestic terror in her own home, now she is the single girl in Southern California causing chaos for movie stars, as well as her own former banker, Mr. Mooney, who just happened to (by pure coincidence) also move to the same place. You get 26 episodes worth, along with plenty of special features, in The Lucy Show - The Official Fourth Season!

Read our review by skees53 here:
http://www.sitcomsonline.com/thelucy...dvdreview.html

Please post any questions or comments about this set.

[LittleRickyII]

Originally Posted by TJ

Lucy is on the move in The Lucy Show - The Official Fourth Season! Lucy Carmichael (Lucille Ball) and Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon) move from Danville to California (leaving Viv behind, and leaving son Jerry in a California military academy) in this season of change. No longer is Lucy just a domestic terror in her own home, now she is the single girl in Southern California causing chaos for movie stars, as well as her own former banker, Mr. Mooney, who just happened to (by pure coincidence) also move to the same place. You get 26 episodes worth, along with plenty of special features, in The Lucy Show - The Official Fourth Season!

Read our review by skees53 here:
http://www.sitcomsonline.com/thelucy...dvdreview.html

Please post any questions or comments about this set.

Good review of season four, but there is one sentence I have to take issue with: "The series still has some creative steam here, and it hasn't resorted to the 'guest star of the week' format quite yet that it will evolve into by season five (which is where the series legitimately did get weak)."

First of all, if by "guest star of the week" format, you're referring to Lucy's celebrity encounters, that actually happened more times during the fourth season than in any other season. There were 10 such episodes during the fourth season, compared with 8 in the sixth season, and only 6 during the fifth season. So in fact, this happened nearly twice as often in the fourth season as in the fifth. And as for the series getting weak in the fifth season, I beg to differ on that. I think the fifth season was when the show finally settled comfortably into its new format. There were some mediocre episodes that season, for sure, but there were also some strong ones, and a few standouts, like "Lucy and the Ring-a-Ding Ring," "Lucy Goes to London," and "Lucy and John Wayne." There were a couple cute episodes in the fourth season ("Lucy Dates Dean Martin," "Lucy Helps Danny Thomas," and "Lucy, the Gun Moll"), but no standouts. Most were simply not funny and leave the viewer unsatisfied. Some were just awful ("Lucy, the Robot"; "Lucy, the Rain Goddess"). There was also an incongruity in the fourth season scripts that give the feeling that the writers were struggling to figure out the direction of the show. Sometimes it was believable (if not funny), and far too many times, the themes were way over-the-top (e.g, the episode where Lucy is chasing a gorilla that stole her autograph book; the one where a gorilla is chasing her; the completely implausible episode where she gets shot out of a cannon(!); the one where her adrenal glands are malfunctioning to the point where she's flying through the air like Peter Pan). And besides these ridiculously unbelievable themes, there's the equally ridiculous recurring theme where Lucy keeps coincidentally running into Mr. Mooney all over the greater Los Angeles area. No matter where she is -- on a street corner, in restaurants, in a movie studio, at her new bank, wherever -- Mooney somehow winds up in the same place. This happens in at least six episodes. Thankfully, in the fifth season the show came a little closer to reality, and brought more laughs.