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...would the Hasty Pudding Club name Lucille Ball Woman of the Year in 1988? Ball deserves as many awards as the entertainment industry can hand out--she's a legend. Yet, in recent years, her TV projects have been few and far between. Her 1986 return to the sitcom world, Lucy, was a short-lived failure. Woman of the Past Four Decades, maybe, but not Woman of the Year...
...then I turned on my TV set. Susan St. James and Jane Curtin were playing the title roles in Kate and Allie, the CBS sitcom about two single mothers who share three children and one household. On that evening's episode, the duo spent most of the show in a slapstick routine climbing on their furniture after spotting a mouse on the floor, while their kids stood by, nonplussed. Seemed a little bit like something Lucy and Viv might do in The Lucy Show, when Ball and Vivian Vance played--you guessed it--two single mothers with three kids...
There was the standard "Lucy wants to be in show biz." episode, in which she would finagle her way into husband Ricky Ricardo's act at the Tropicana nightclub. The writers wrote half an episode of actual sitcom dialogue and left the rest up to the Vaudevillean song and dance talents of Lucy, Ricky, Fred and Ethel. From The Dick Van Dyke Show to the Cosby Show to The Brady Bunch, the "cast puts on a show" episode has become a standard...
...Love Lucy was also innovative for the way in which it was broadcast. It was the first sitcom to be shot in California, and it was the first to be filmed ahead of time--most shows then were broadcast live from New York...
TAKING this all into account, Lucille Ball may not be such an untimely choice for Woman of the Year. The sitcom--the style that I Love Lucy virtually invented--is predominant in the '80's. So are reruns. And through rebroadcasts of her three hit series, 'round the clock, 'round the world and at half past midnight in Boston, Ball probably will be seen by more people this year than any of today's hottest stars. This year and any other year the TV shows are broadcast the way they are now, Lucille Ball is well-deserving of the honor...