Lucy Goes to the Hospital

"Lucy Goes to the Hospital"
I Love Lucy episode
Episode no.Season 2
Episode 16
Directed byWilliam Asher
Written by
Featured musicEliot Daniel
Cinematography byKarl Freund
Original air dateJanuary 19, 1953 (1953-01-19)
Running time30 minutes
Guest appearances
  • Charles Lane as Mr. Stanley
  • Peggy Rea as Wheelchair Nurse
  • Adele Longmire as Desk Nurse
  • Barbara Pepper as Nursery Nurse
  • Hazel Pierce as Nursery Nurse
  • Ruth Perrott as Nurse
  • Bennett Green as Orderly
  • Ralph Montgomery as Policeman
  • William Hamel as Maitre D'
  • James John Ganzer as Baby
Episode chronology
← Previous
"Lucy Becomes a Sculptress" 		Next →
"Sales Resistance"
List of episodes

"Lucy Goes to the Hospital" is an episode of the 1950s American television show I Love Lucy in which the title character, Lucy Ricardo, gives birth to a baby boy after a chaotic sequence of events. Twelve hours before the original broadcast on January 19, 1953, the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, had given birth to Desi Arnaz Jr. by cesarean section. The episode had actually been filmed on November 14, 1952.

Impact & legacy

The episode was the culmination of an unprecedented pairing of the fictional pregnancy of Lucy with the real-life pregnancy of Ball; "real-time pregnancy was fictively narrated for the first time on American television."[1][a]

When the episode premiered on January 19, 1953, 73.9% of all American homes with television sets tuned in, amounting to 44 million viewers watching the episode, a record until September 9, 1956, when Elvis Presley appeared for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show, at CBS, which drew a share of 82.6%, a figure unrivaled since.[3] It received higher ratings than the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which received 29 million viewers, the day afterward.[4] According to the Indian newspaper The Telegraph, scripts for the episode were reviewed by a rabbi, a minister, and a priest in order to make sure it would not be offensive.[citation needed]

The cover story of Newsweek on January 19, 1953, was about the episode (which had not yet been aired when the issue went to press). The first issue of TV Guide, dated April 3, 1953, featured a cover photo of newborn Desi Arnaz Jr., captioned as "Lucy's $50,000,000 Baby".[5]

Numerous stories were published about the sex of the baby, which was kept secret until the episode aired; when Ball actually had a boy as Lucy did in the script, headlines proclaimed "Lucy sticks to script: a boy it is!" (New York Daily Mirror), "TV was right: a boy for Lucille" (New York Daily News), and "What the Script Ordered" (Life magazine).[3]

Notes

  1. ^ This may not entirely be true, since Mary Kay and Johnny is also reputed to have written the pregnancy of its star Mary Kay Stearns into the script; that more obscure series has since been mostly destroyed, making it difficult to verify.[2]

References

  1. ^ Berlant, Lauren (2002). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Duke University Press. p. 133. ISBN 0822319241. Retrieved August 25, 2011.
  2. ^ Mikkelson, David (September 22, 2022) [April 24, 1999]. "Who Was the First TV Couple to Sleep in the Same Bed?". Snopes.com. Snopes Inc. Retrieved January 22, 2026. Another foreshadowing of the later "I Love Lucy" series occurred in December 1948 when the birth of the Stearns' first child was worked into an episode on the same day that Mary Kay herself gave birth, and the infant character was later added to the cast.
  3. ^ a b Landay, Lori (2010). I Love Lucy. Wayne State University Press. p. 74. ISBN 978-0-8143-3261-0. Retrieved August 25, 2011.
  4. ^ Sanders, Coyne Stephen & Gilbert, Tom (1993). Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Quill, an imprint of William Morrow and Company. p. 69. ISBN 0-688-13514-5. Retrieved August 25, 2011.
  5. ^ Fiftiesweb.com

See also


allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Goes_to_the_Hospital