The Children Ruined the first 3 seasons

After S1 the kids were rarely seen except for a brief walk-on line sporadically. Even during S1 they were more or less glorified props with very little to say and as the season progressed they were seen less and less. By S2 they had to be paid for episodes that they did not appear in because their contract guaranteed them a minimum number of weeks to work that they did not appear in, this is one of the reasons why Lucy got rid of them after S3 because she never liked having to pay people for just standing around. Vivian Vance and Gale Gordon (in S2) did not like working with them. According to Candy Moore neither one ever spoke to her once. Lucy did not like working with children on The Lucy Show (although she worked very well with her own children on HL) either but she felt it was important to have them for the sake of the series. S1 is still my favorite season nevertheless, there are a lot of really great eps. The first ep 'Lucy waits up for Chris' is one of the very best of the entire series and revolves almost entirely around Lucy. As a matter of fact, the very first 5 or 6 eps are really outstanding.

The kids were okay in this one, but I much prefer Little Ricky from I Love Lucy. He was just so charming and adorable.

Don't play games with a girl who can play better.

I agree - especially that they were both way too old to have kids that age!

In a sense, I guess I agree with you Jayson. But I believe it's the fault of the writers/producer that the kids were not used properly. They were backdrops to the plots that almost always were about Lucy and Viv.

I realize they weren't making Our Three Kids, or the Jerry and Sherman Show, but the kids sure seemed to be occasionally around and too-conveniently absent most of the time. When they were in the show, their presence was usually brief, just to set up the Viv and Lucy situation--like you pointed out.

I do believe that Lucy and Viv were not supposed to be as old as the actresses were. They seemed to be portrayed as women about the age of 40, maybe a bit over, which clearly does not make them too old to have kids "that age."

In the original concept, the two women sharing a house with neither of them holding a job would have presented a problem if there had been no kids. I mean in terms of getting a variety of plots for the scripts. The children's activities did provide a good many of the scripts--between the scouts, baseball, football, dating, etc.

Now this wasn't the only series to have an "occasional" child--one that was featured sometimes and strangely absent from many episodes and many scenes where you would expect him to be there. Prime example: Richie Petry. Sometimes it seemed like Rob and Laura's rule was for Richie to stay in his own bedroom whenever he wasn't eating breakfast in the kitchen with them. He almost never was seen watching TV or playing by himself or with a friend in the living room, like normal kids of his age would do.






Why don't we just shoot 'em down and be through with it?