(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Job Switching”
FIRST AIRED: Sept. 15, 1952

In “Job Switching,” the Season Two premiere of I Love Lucy, Lucy and Ethel land jobs at a chocolate factory and find themselves battling the societal norms of the day – with mixed results.   

Assigned to the candy-dipping department, Lucy lasts all of two minutes before she instigates a chocolate-doused slap fight with her co-worker. Later, the two gal pals attempt to wrap candy fed to them from a conveyor belt. Unable to contend with the belt’s unforgiving velocity, they resort to stuffing the chocolate in their hats, dresses, and mouths, leading to one of the show’s immortal lines:

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“Speed it up a little!”

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(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: The Twilight Zone
EPISODE: “The Invaders”
FIRST AIRED: Jan. 27, 1961

Submitted for your disapproval, an unspoken rule, a blasphemous observation, a cold hard dose of reality-shaking truth: half of The Twilight Zone’s episodes were just not very good.

Of course, the classics are the classics are the classics: “Where Is Everybody?” “The Midnight Sun,” and “The After Hours” live on as witty and memorable forays into the darkest corners of the human condition. But for every “Eye of the Beholder,” the writers served up a pile of other episodes that remain forgotten for a reason.
 
In looking at the lackluster1983 movie, the 1985 or 2002 TV reboots, or countless attempts to translate the Twilight Zone format to niche audiences (VH1 mounted a supernatural music anthology series in 2001 called Strange Frequency), one might wonder why no one can seem to replicate The Twilight Zone’s creative success.  It may have something to do with the fact that the progenitor series had a middling success rate itself.

Rod Serling and company were anything but hacks.  They were brilliant, daring dreamers who swung for the fences weekly.  But the very nature of an anthology series nullifies the most reliable rules of thumb that writers follow to engage a television audience.  Familiar characters, settings, and themes aren’t at the forefront.  Ideas take center stage. Suggestions. Offerings. 

This is what most if not all Twilight Zone episodes were: not taut stories but provocative “What if?” prompts meant to do nothing more than propose a devilish idea and pin it with a neat little twist.   Many of these episodes weren’t fully formed works of fiction.  They were narrative zygotes. 

All of this makes Season Two’s perennial classic, “The Invaders” that much more thrilling: in a five-season collection of hit-or-miss episodes that lacked resolution, meaty character arcs, or (let’s face it) good old-fashioned logic, this macabre tale of man vs. monster really does have it all.

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(art by Aireen Arellano / to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: Quantum Leap
EPISODE: “8 1/2 Months”
FIRST AIRED:  Mar. 06, 1991

It’s as durable and tested as a law of physics: think about time travel long enough, and your head will start to hurt.  

Quantum Leap is as smart and beloved as American time-travel franchises come, second only to maybe Back to the Future in terms of warm-hearted cult appeal, but its implied mysteries are as uncontrollable as those of any time-travel story when you start to track the plot’s implications into endless chains of “if, then.”  Given the added dimensions of body switching and the cloudy idea of revising history “for the better,” more questions than answers are not only inevitable for a show like Quantum Leap, they’re tantalizing and expected and enjoyed… if you’re into that sort of thing.

Season Three’s “8 ½ Months” takes the show’s cans of worms to new echelons of weirdness, as the writers dealt themselves the tangled subject of a pregnant male time traveler deciding the fate of a teenage mother and her kid in 1950s Oklahoma. (Right?)

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art by Aireen Arellano (to view the larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”
FIRST AIRED:  May 05, 1952

You can find Lucy’s reeling, disgusted face, presiding over spoon and bottle, on T-shirts, magnets, lunchboxes, posters, postcards, and keychains. You can even buy Vitameatavegamin bottles filled with little heart-shaped candy. To swaths of fans, casual or diehard, this is the episode that defines I Love Lucy. For those who just know the show as a bullet in a pop-culture history encyclopedia, this is the only episode of “I Love Lucy.” 

Truth be told, the episode’s classic status has more to do with the one memorable sequence than as a complete A-to-B arc. “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” is sketch comedy gold, functioning not only as another display of Lucille Ball’s mad brilliance but also as sly “bite the hand that feeds you” satire. Taken as a whole, though, the story falls flat.

The episode opens with Ricky in need of a spokeswoman for the commercial break of the television special he’s emceeing. Lucy overhears and pleads for the job. Ricky says no, so in one of her oddest gambits to prove her talent, she climbs into the Ricardos’ TV set to prove she looks good on the small screen.

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This is one of those era-specific bits that only could have existed in the time in which it was conceived. Any analogous scenario today would have involved Lucy making an ass of herself in front of a borrowed camcorder and trying to pass the resultant home video off as a legitimate commercial, but no kind of modernity would have been nearly as funny as seeing Lucy shove herself inside a home appliance and consider it rational behavior. Certainly, it’s hard to beat the delirious absurdity of Lucy dropping the cigarette pack and reaching out of the TV to retrieve it. 

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Ricky is unmoved, but nonetheless, thanks to an intercepted phone message, Lucy worms her way into the job as the spokeswoman for a health tonic, immortally named Vitameatavegamin, a four-pronged portmanteau of its disgusting key ingredients. Lucy arrives on set for rehearsal, unaware that the drink also contains a 23% alcohol quotient. 

She rattles off her dutifully memorized monologue with pep and professionalism, impressing the director. It’s only when she takes a spoonful of the stuff that the professionalism ends and the comedy begins.

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Lucy’s first reaction to the taste is probably the highlight of the entire half hour. Her peppy face melts into a sick frown, as if she just threw back a shot of sewage milkshake. She punctuates it with a shiver that indicates the liquid slithering like bitter cement down her throat. The director makes her do it again and again, and with each rehearsal take, Lucille Ball adds just one more hiccup and mismatched syllable. The joy in the comedic sequence, the reason for its timelessness, is that it’s not an assault of quips and pratfalls. It’s the slowest of builds. By the end, she’s turned the Vitameatavegamin table into a pub counter, setting the spoon on the table and pouring the liquid into it with all the delicacy of Jackson Pollock. She’s not just a drunk version of Lucy. Her mannerisms seem to indicate that she’s morphed into an entirely different character: Lucy’s drunk uncle, maybe?

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Storytellers in any medium love to talk about stakes. Stakes, stakes, stakes, stakes, stakes. You could mistake a writers’ table for a butcher shop. The curious thing about this episode, though, is that the writers chose to stage the main sequence during the rehearsal of Ricky’s show, not the actual broadcast, when of course a lot more would be at stake as Lucy would be a drunken mess on live television.  

It’s a smart move, though. By setting it at the rehearsal, they’ve granted the audience a scenario in which Lucy repeats the monologue over and over again, getting drunker and drunker in the process. The writers have essentially traded in higher stakes for a practically endless negative feedback loop of comedy.   

Also notable about the classic sequence is how it functions more as a satire on advertising than it does as another testament to how daffy Lucy is. If the original girl had shown up to the audition, she too would have ended up stumbling through the studio proudly waving her three sheets. In a writer’s mind, at least, who’s “to blame” usually turns out to be the dramatic impetus for the whole story. In this case, it’s not Lucy. It’s the product-makers. 

When “I Love Lucy” aired, commercial spots like these were common: instead of a 30-second segment with flashy visuals, ad breaks often just consisted of a pretty spokesperson talking to camera about product features through a mannequin-like smile, and they were often for snake-oily products like Vitameatavegamin. Since of course those advertisers were footing the bill for “I Love Lucy,” it was a bold move on Desilu’s part to produce an episode in which the biggest idiot on display isn’t Lucy, but the product of the week. The original broadcast of this episode more than likely cut from Lucy drooling over the Vitameatavegamin table to a spokesperson holding up a can of Fluffo Shortening (one of the show’s original sponsors).

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So with the timeless comedic sequence and sharp satire, what’s missing from “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”? There’s not much in the way of narrative elegance here. After Lucy’s inebriated rehearsal, there’s a built-in suspenseful anticipation of what kind of havoc she’ll wreak on Ricky’s show and what the consequences of that inevitable disaster will be. Alas, the writers are all out of steam at this point – Lucy stumbles on stage during Ricky’s broadcast, he frantically scoops her up, and the episode is done. 

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This is one of those episodes that just ends with no real resolution or final dramatic punch to wrap up the story. The writers of “I Love Lucy” were indeed capable of constructing crackerjack plots with satisfying and often surprising endings, and when they did, they rewarded their audience with insight, however broad, into the characters or marriage or friendship or whatever sitcom-universal topic they happened to be riffing on that week.

It seems like a nitpicky quibble, but leaving the narrative of “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” dangling like a frayed wire makes the whole episode feeling like empty calories. But ultimately, who cares? It’s so tasty, too!

~ C.J. Arellano

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About the Art: As C.J. noted, this episode is all about that hilariously disgusted look on Lucy’s face. My hope is that anyone who looks at this artwork feels a little sick themselves. I used the putrid yellow/green color of the liquid, bold fuchsia color of the background, and frantic nature of the lines as your tickets to Barf Town. I also wanted to convey humor by playing up the dissonance of the blatant grossness and the happy declaration in the speech bubble. ~ Aireen Arellano

art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Lucy Does the Tango”
FIRST AIRED:  Mar. 11, 1957

By the sixth season of I Love Lucy, the creators moved Lucy and the gang from Manhattan to the Connecticut countryside, ostensibly to unpack new opportunities for comedy and storytelling. The change certainly underscored the show’s function as a spry comedy of manners, as Lucy now had to battle the rigid etiquette and refined neighborly protocol of upstate New England. Something, however, was lost in translation: much of the country episodes don’t have the same vitality as the New York seasons. Whether it was due to creative fatigue, Lucy and Desi’s increasingly strained personal and professional lives, or just the fact that country-based slapstick makes the show feel just a little too broad and square (not even I Love Lucy could mine suspense from a tulip contest), the show had lost a little of its luster in the relocation. 

Still, “Lucy Does the Tango” is the best of the country set. This is the episode in which Lucy stuffs a bunch of eggs down her shirt, only to find herself doing the tango with Ricky. So absurd, unlikely, and comically sublime is the situation that it must have been the episode on everyone’s mind when the first person pitched the idea, “Hey, let’s move them all to the country!”

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art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “The Diet”
FIRST AIRED:  Oct. 29, 1951

In “The Diet,” Lucy plunges into a crash diet to wriggle herself into a size 12 dress and into Ricky’s show. It’s no Vitameatavegamin or chocolate factory escapade, but this early episode conflates the most well-worn atoms that floated in the I Love Lucy writers’ brains: Lucy’s infantile desperation to get in the act, the audacious if not admirable extremes to which our heroine resorts to achieve her improbable goal, potent sight gags, a hammy nightclub toe-tapping number at episode’s end, and a common adult issue of the week – in this case, weight consciousness – so “relatable” in that broad sitcom sense that the episode could double as a magazine article.  Only the fourth episode produced, “The Diet” is like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, presenting the show’s most vital components in one finely drawn half-hour.

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