American Icons: I Love Lucy

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is where television invented itself.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX.
0:07.0	Studio 360.
0:11.2	This is American icons.
0:13.8	I'm Kurt Anderson.
0:14.9	Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
0:16.2	And the year is 1950.
0:18.3	Tonight, the star of the radio program, my favorite husband, Lucille Ball.
0:23.1	Lucille Ball, the radio actress, is talking with reporters on a radio show called Hollywood
0:28.2	Byline.
0:29.0	Bob Thomas.
0:29.7	You do think that television is here to stay, though?
0:32.5	Well, I'm afraid so.
0:33.9	I do hope that they get it on film or something so that it doesn't take so much time so that we don't have to give up pictures to do television or vice versa.
0:42.3	Vice versa.
0:44.3	1950.
0:45.3	Probably the last moment anybody could question the viability of television.
0:50.3	TV was about to become the engine of popular culture. and at the very center of it, Lucille Ball.
0:58.7	Her sitcom, I Love Lucy, defined the rules of TV comedy.
1:03.0	It was the killer app of the new medium.
1:05.8	Here is when American TV became American TV.
1:11.2	And Lucy is still an inspiration in the writer's rooms of the best sitcoms of this era.
1:16.9	These are the Ten Commandments of Comedy.
	...

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