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