I Love Lucy creator and co-star Desi Arnaz is credited (along with wife Lucille Ball) for inventing several techniques that are now taken for granted in television sitcoms. Without the pioneering work they did, television would be very different indeed. In fact, you could say Arnaz invented the television rerun.
Broadcasting TV shows was very different back in the early 1950s. A show was taped live on the east coast, saved on a kinescope – a recording of a program that was filmed off of a video monitor – then rebroadcast on the west coast. Kinescopes provided an inferior image and degraded pretty quickly.
In the early days of television, most production was done in New York, but Lucy and Desi refused to leave Hollywood and insisted on taping I Love Lucy on the west coast. The network protested, claiming that live production in L.A. was impractical and because of the time difference between coasts, the network would be forced to air blurry kinescopes in the east, where most television-viewing homes were located.
So, Arnaz and Ball offered a solution – they would produce I Love Lucy on film and dispense with the kinescopes altogether.
To offset this major expense to the network, Lucy and Desi agreed to cut their joint weekly salary from $5,000 to $4,000 on the condition that their production company, Desilu (also the first independent TV production company), retained all rights to the show.
The network agreed and this paved the way for television reruns and syndication.
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