Shark Bytes

With all due respect to the lower post.

Mr. Mooney played by Gale Gordon will go down as one of the best straight man in the history of TV. Him blowing his top was part of the fun, and as they said to Dan Quyale (he is a fictional, not real)

Nobody seems to know why THE LUCY SHOW never had a legitimate dvd release, except for some poor quality public domain episodes....it is too bad, since the first black and white season is nearly as good as your average "I Love Lucy" episode...and was written by the original writers....Madelyn Davis, Bob Carroll Jr, Bob Shiller and Weiskopf..
The problem is that after color came to the show, so did new writers. They came up with nothing new...so we had many more seasons to listen to Mr. Mooney scream, and listen to Lucille's voice get hoarser and hoarser as she screamed, "Waaahhh...Mistuh Mooneyyyyyy" over and over again.
HERE'S LUCY was indeed even more lame and childish. Interesting to note that Lucy, in whatever format, almost always had a show in the top 10. They (like Lucy herself) just doesn't age very well.

As Here's Lucy doesn't have a separate section, and as I have seen very little of the "official" Lucy Show (although what I have seen wasn't that impressive, I will basically limit my review to Here's Lucy.

I Love Lucy is of course one of the 10 greatest sitcoms of all time, but good grief, was this show dreadful. PG comedy at it's worst. I got the official "Here's Lucy" DVD set that was supposed to be the show's "best" episodes. Man if those were the best-just think what the worst must have been like. Lucille Ball must have been one of the 10 most influential people in Hollywood by 1968. I mean who's idea was it to keep airing this tripe? All it basically was was some thread bare plot so that Ball could bring in one of her Hollywood friends to do some lame sketch. Unlike Lucy Ricardo, Lucy Carter did not have any connections to Hollywood, so this never made any sense. It would be "Oh my gosh-there's Sammy Davis Jr!" Or "Can you believe it-Lawrence Welk." The person who said Lucie Arnaz couldn't act was dead on. Neither could her brother. Probably the best example of "nepotism" in Hollywood. That had to be the life. Have your rich and famous mother get you a big money, high-profile job while if you were Joe or Jane Ordinary you would be lucky to get a commercial role. This thing was DOA, and yet it lasted 6 years! How did they let that happen? How many excellent CBS shows did we the viewer miss while Ball pulled backstage politics to get this tripe renewed year after year? She survived the great purge of 1970-1971, when shows like "Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres" got the axe. I'm sure they were past their prime but they must have been better than this.
However, I must admit Lucie Arnaz was quite attractive. Also, whoever wrote a long time ago that Ball was "thumbing her nose at Baby Boomers?" by ridiculing rock music is not correct. Desi Arnaz Jr. was a member of a rock "band" (term used ultra loosely...) back in the mid-to-late 1960s called "Dino, Desi, and Billy. They even had 2 Top 40 hits (again with the nepotism...), so I don't believe she was trying to ridicule rock music. It's still a terrible show though.

"The Lucy Show" never jumped the shark. All six seasons were excellent. True, there were a few clunkers just as there were many clunkers in season one of "I Love Lucy." Lucille Ball is the great dame of comedy, you gotta love this gal. She was a comic genius. The majority of the people still remember "The Lucy Show" and love it. It was a great comedy of the 1960's and shouldn't be compared to "Here's Lucy" an entirely different show. "The Lucy Show" had many classic episodes including Lucy and Viv put up a TV antenna, install a shower, Lucy dating Dean Martin's double, creating chaos on John Wayne's movie set and singing w/Mel Torme in the classic Wingding episode. "The Lucy Show" never was out of the top ten TV shows and I look forward for all six seasons on DVD.

The character of Mr. Mooney and his verbal abuse was cringe-worthy. Sure, Lucy could be flake, but his tirades were extreme and unnecessary.

The show jumped when Lucie Arnaz tried to act. A perfect case of nepotism.

The Lucy Show is way way better than i love lucy!

THe I love Lucy show was one of the best comedy show that i have ever watched. Desi's love for Lucy seemed so realistic but i guess in real life it wasn't.Desi arnaz had explained on T.V one night the real reason ofhim and Lucy's breakup, appearently Desi said that he thought Lucy was nuts and she was flying of the handle but then he rewatched the old episodes and realised that that was just Lucy. Lucy was an amazing and loving person and her memory will always be in our hearts now Desi on the other hand will not be!!!

The first season of The Lucy Show was by far the best. Lucy was best with Vivian Vance because Vance was perhaps a near-equal in talent as a performer. When Gale Gordon started on the show, that is when the quality started going downhill. I know Lucy loved him, but he just lacked character and humanity. His screaming and yelling grew old after awhile. I agree with the other posters here, after Vivian Vance left the show never recovered from the loss.

The shows made in the 60s played daily as reruns in Rochester NY so I saw many of them as a kid in the 70s. Long time ago but I do remember better episodes with Vivian Vance, after she left as I see it the creativity was mostly gone and it was blah blah blah and cash a paycheck time for all involved. Also what happened to Lucy's kids when she moved to CA? I guess they are out there somewhere with the Brady's dog Tiger.

The first three seasons, featuring Vivian Vance were consistently good (the episode where the ladies try to install a shower but get trapped inside, unable to shut the water off was equal to anything they EVER did on "I Love Lucy"), and it was never as enjoyable after Vance left. However, Ball and Gale Gordon always made the best of the material, even though it was much weaker during the last few years. More often than not, the scripts were little more than flimsy efforts to work one of Lucille Ball's famous Hollywood friends into the plot. Just the same, some later episodes, particularly the ones featuring Jack Benny and George Burns were very cute and still hold up today. And Lucy's 1967 "reunion" episode with Vivian Vance, where the ladies disguise themselves as hippies is phenomenally funny.

I personally think the show never jumped. "The Lucy Show" might not of been as good as "I Love Lucy", But I think even the later seasons were enjoyable thanks to special guest stars.

The show jumped the shark when renamed Here's Lucy. The best of The Lucy Show was with Vivian Vance. Like I Love Lucy, the situations were more realistic and the Lucy character still showed some worth. They had lots of classic moments and the show was very entertaining. The California years were not that bad because they gave us classic moments (Lucy and the ring, Lucy and Mel Trome, Lucy the Gun Moll, Lucy and Dean Martin). I did not like Here's Lucy. It was way too slow moving. Lucy was getting older and she had to be so toned down, it was not funny. The writers were horrible and while she could be funny physically, she had awful scripts. By then, the Mr. Mooney and lucy interplay did not work for relatives. The kids were not great actors and the generation gap was done to death. I liked Mary Jane in Lucy and Sheldon Lenord, but by Here's Lucy she was just a person to get all the unwanted lines.

I am guessing Lucy had a lot of power in Hollywood she churned out garbage after I Love Lucy.I can only imagine people behind the scenes of horrible episodes of these shows watching dreadful performances of Lucy well past her Lucy Ricardo days, not all episodes of I Love Lucy were winners but it was the show of the 50s and all shows have a few clunkers in them. who ever said that Lucy did not age well was correct.To the poster who got dvds at a local store and demaned a refund we have the same type of dvds I am guessing you have, we got at Target paid seven so we really got ripped.If I was hunter they would be used for skeet shooting HORRIBLE shows Lucy looks like a corpse in these shows.

I wasn't born when the original 1950s show was on, and the first exposure to the comedy stylings of Lucille Ball came with this show in the 1960s-70s. Gotta say, one did wonder where the attraction lay. There was a puzzling amount of shouting, which was actually pretty painful (especially Lucie and Mary Jane, although the leather-lunged Lucy always out-volumed everyone else), and one didn't always know who the 'guest stars' were. As to when the Shark moment came, how about the episode when Lucie Arnaz and the guy from 'That's Incredible!' changed the crusty old Dean's mind about funding the University music program by singing 'I Believe In Music' to him. Finger-down-the-throat time.