I grew up watching this show on Nick@Nite (& saw it before I Love Lucy) and last yeat I bought the season 1 DVD. Last week I bought a $5 DVD set of about 30 episodes from the California era. Huge contrast; they might as well be completely different shows. The California episodes have aged horribly. The writting’s very poor, the sets feel claustrophobic, and practically every episode is one long comedy sketch with a long forgotten celebrity or two. In contrast the Danfield era holds up much better. The writting is much better, the plots make much more sense, and Mrs Carmichael is both more smarter & looks older (though that could just be because she does a better job of acting her age).
You pretty much answered your own question. Every TV iteration of Lucy was a weaker version of I Love Lucy. And let’s face it, Lucy was 40 when I Love Lucy premiered, and 63 when Here’s Lucy ended (we’ll skip Life with Lucy entirely). A lot of the physical stuff just didn’t work as the years went by, and they had to put more and more gauze on the camera lens.
I actually got to go on the set of Life With Lucy during rehearsals (in front of a rehearsal audience).
It was truly dreadful. When one line didn’t work, Lucy stopped the rehearsal and called for the writer. Some poor girl showed up with a clipboard and Lucy was irritated, saying, “that line wasn’t funny. Think of something else.”
Gee - any pressure? Comedy legend, in bad mood, asks you to come up with a funnier line in front of an entire audience on the spot.
The girl with the clipboard just stood there, in front of about 200 people, and you could tell she was about to have a heart attack and die. Finally, Lucy came up with a line and said, “Just put that in.”
It was somewhat funnier, but not by much. Still, clipboard girl was obviously relieved and dashed off.
Lucy tried, but the show was a really, really bad rehash of everything she had ever done before, and I guess she just didn’t realize the old shtick wasn’t going to work anymore.
I never thought The Lucy Show was particularly funny - and was surprised it lasted that long. I think Lucy without Desi was sort of a more pathetic character and seemed a bit more hard-edged because of it. However, I still think the original I Love Lucy was comedy gold, and deserves to be rated as one of the classics of the golden age of television.
Sadly, the best part of The Lucy Show was the puppetoon Lucy at the beginning. The second best part was Gale Gordon.
Lucille Ball really should have completely retired to run Desilu and make occasional 70s variety show appearances after I Love Lucy ended. And she really should have turned down Mame!.
ETA: Whoops! The puppetoon credits were for Here’s Lucy, not The Lucy Show.
Oddly enough once the Lucy Show moved to California it’s rating went UP not down.
Here are the year end ratings
Part of the reason it aged so badly was it lack continuity. Each show was almost like a show unto itself. One episode Mrs Carmichael is presented as an effiecent and overworked secretary the next show she is totally incompetent.
Another problem is reliance on guest stars. Now younger people only have vague ideas who they are. Most people will reconginize the name Jack Benny but who knows anything he did?
For those who recall Jack Benny, if you remember his TV show it was like Lucy in California. The show changed each week. One week it was a sitcom, the next it was two sketch comedies, the next time it aired it was musical variety. Jack changed every week. Once Lucy moved to California her show was like that too.
I recall reading an interview with Lucille Ball and she blamed the decline in quality of *the Lucy Show * and Here’s Lucy on the writers. She said they would just dump scripts on her and there was nothing she could do.
But her own daughter Lucie Arnaz Jr said that if her mother said that, it couldn’t be true, because Lucie insists her mother was always in total control of everything on her show and never would have allowed that to happen.
I found once the show moved to California the only “Vivian Vance replacement” that worked to any degree was Ann Sothern. Ann Sothern said she was offered the chance to take over from Vivian Vance, but said she didn’t want to be second fiddle to Lucy, since they were such good friends, she wanted to remain friends. And that wouldn’t happen if she were second fiddle to Lucy.
Of course Sothern went on to play the voice of a mother reincarnated as a car 
Though I have to admit Mary Jane Croft did the best she could to replace Vance, and I thought she did an OK job and she certainly put forth a 100% in her performace. It just wasn’t the same without Vivian Vance, though certainly Croft gave it 100%
According to Wikipedia after Ball had a falling out with Bob Carroll, Jr. and Madelyn Martin over a script she didn’t like at the end of season 2 they left and the other 2 writers (Bobs Schiller & Weiskoph) followed. She then hired one of Jack Benny’s writers (Milt Josefsberg) as a consultant, but didn’t bother hiring any permanent writers. :eek: She just hired a new writer(s) every week to write an episode. That explains alot really.