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Miro101's Replies
I've viewed those early "Lucy Show"'s many, many times, and the performances I've seen by Ball are, apparently, not the same ones you saw. I maintain that she did not "yell" her lines at that time. She was in her early fifties--about a decade older than she was as Lucy Ricardo--but her "I Love Lucy" litheness and well-calibrated vigor are still much in evidence. She delivers her lines clearly and often raucously, but then, she'd delivered her Lucy Ricardo lines in much the same way: working in front of a live audience in a three-camera television show, similar to performing in the theatre, calls for pitching one's performance to the contours of a presentational, declamatory acting register. Performing in that heightened, stylized register, Ball--in those early seasons of "The Lucy Show," just as she had in "ILL"--nevertheless managed to deploy a grounded, credible persona.
Witness, for example, "Lucy Puts Up a TV Antenna," from season one of "The Lucy Show." Near the end, when Viv lights a fire that billows smoke up to Lucy, whose ass is stuck in the chimney, Lucy says to Viv (who's berating Lucy) in a low-key, rueful way, "That's right: Pick on me when I'm stuck in here getting hickory-smoked hips." It's a cute, funny line, delivered in a typical "Lucy" moment of slapstick implausibility, but Ball's matter-of-factness makes the moment a recognizably human one. Ditto her weary invitation, in "Lucy and the Electric Mattress," to Viv to join her on the second tier of the bunk bed: "Come on," she mumbles with a mouth full of potato chips. She could, I suppose, have barked a frustrated "Come on!"--but that would've been the easy and (I think) less funny choice. (And, by the way, I happen to love the earlier scene with the wayward electric mattress: it's a clever, well-choreographed bit of slapstick involving an enormous, high-tech--for the time--prop.) I could cite many more such examples. I simply don't share your nearly sweeping condemnation of Ball's acting in the early seasons of "The Lucy Show."
There are, no doubt, many poorly written episodes in even the earlier seasons of "The Lucy Show," but I'd argue that the good ones (especially in seasons 1 and 2) outnumber the bad. And I'd argue, too, that Ball didn't bellow her lines in those episodes (in the manner that she indeed did in later years--I wholly agree that those phoned-in, one-dimensional performances were depressing).
In the best early "Lucy Show" episodes, she was still playing what seemed to be a real person (despite the implausible situations the Lucy character became embroiled in), interacting believably with her co-stars, and doing wonderful physical comedy.
While I agree that much, if not most, of "Here's Lucy" is poor, the first two or three seasons of "The Lucy Show" were excellent. Classic episodes such as "Lucy and Viv Install a Shower" are spectacularly funny and are as good as any episode of "I Love Lucy."
When asked that question in an appearance on Phil Donahue (she was promoting "Mame"), Lucy replied, wryly, "You can't touch this"--meaning it wasn't possible to find a singer to match Lucy's distinctive, hoarse speaking voice. Lisa Kirk was rumored to have been considered as the dubbed voice, but ultimately Warner Bros. decided to go with Lucy.