The Fifties

by David Halberstam

In fact, the show had perfect pitch. Broad in its humor yet able to appeal to a wide variety of tastes, it was number one in New York within four months. Soon, as many as two out of three television sets were tuned to her. Marshall Field, the prominent Chicago department store, which had used Monday as its clearance sale night, surrendered and switched to Thursday by putting a sign in its window: “We love Lucy too so we’re closing on Monday nights.” Lucy insisted the show be shot before a live audience—her experience in film and radio had taught her that she performed better when there was an audience she could see and reach out to. Opposite her, on NBC, there was a program called Lights Out, a mystery anthology that was a top-rated show. As Mike Dann, the NBC programmer who had so proudly made it so, remembered, “We were wiped out very quickly. We never knew what had happened, but it happened and it happened fast. And it happened without promotion—it wasn’t because CBS went in and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting this new show with a wacky redhead. It happened because it happened.” It did not matter what show Lucy went against: She triumphed. As such, she began to redefine the nature of sitcoms. Previously, they existed as carryovers from radio, in which old-fashioned storytelling and sound effects were emphasized. The great strength of the Lucy show, a television writer named Jack Sher and his wife, Marilyn, pointed out, was the mirror it held up to every...