I Love Lucy: Season 01 (1951)

By the time the first 35 episodes of I Love Lucy had been shown on CBS' Monday night lineup, virtually everybody in America loved zany redhead Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball), her Cuban bandleader husband Ricky (Desi Arnaz) and their landlords and best friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance, William Frawley). The series admirably set up most of the standard situations that would endear it to the viewing public within its first two months on the air. In the debut episode "The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub," Lucy pulls off her first "disguise scene" to fool Ricky; in "Lucy Thinks Ricky Is Trying to Murder Her" (the first episode filmed, but not the first one shown), our heroine takes a minor misunderstanding to hitherto unscaled farcical heights; and in "The Diet," Lucy makes the first of innumerable attempts to break into show business. Other memorable first-season episodes include: "The Audition," which was actually a remake of the original 1950 I Love Lucy pilot, treating fans to the actual nightclub act in which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz appeared prior to their TV debut; "The Séance" would be memorable but for the classic line "Ethel to Tillie...Ethel to Tillie..."; "Lucy Fakes Illlness" is highlighted by Lucy's dead-on imitation of Tallulah Bankhead; and "Pioneer Women" features the outrageous "fast-rising bread" gag. Best of all, not to mention one of the most famous individual half-hour episodes in TV history, is "Lucy Does a TV Commercial," in which an increasingly besotted Lucy tries to extol the praises of that miracle concoction "Vitameatavegamin." ~ Rovi