The TV sitcom of all TV sitcom's, "I Love Lucy" continues to be seen as one of the funniest and cleverly written shows in TV history. One of the original writers of the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz comedy show has passed on.
Writer Madelyn Pugh Davis passed away in her Bel Air home this past week and we are sadden with the news as we always looked forward to her interviews looking back on her time writing for the comedy hit.
Madelyn Pugh Davis, who with her writing partner Bob Carroll Jr. made television history in the 1950s writing Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's landmark situation comedy "I Love Lucy," has died. She was 90.
Davis, a pioneering female radio and TV comedy writer whose work with the red-haired queen of TV comedy spanned four decades, died Wednesday at her home in Bel-Air after a brief illness, said her son, Michael Quinn Martin.
The team of Davis and Carroll was writing Ball's CBS radio comedy "My Favorite Husband," co-starring Richard Denning, when they and their colleague, writer-producer Jess Oppenheimer, wrote the pilot episode for "I Love Lucy."
The Emmy Award-winning series about a wacky New York City housewife and her Cuban bandleader husband ran on CBS from 1951 to 1957. It was ranked No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings for four of its six seasons and was never out of the top three.
"I Love Lucy" has been playing around the world continuously ever since.
When interviewers asked Ball, who died in 1989, what she thought was the secret of her show's enduring popularity, she had a stock answer: "My writers."
"My mother never accepted an award where she didn't immediately say, 'I could not have done this without my writers.' She always put them first," Lucie Arnaz told The Times on Thursday.
"Madelyn was such a class act," Arnaz said. "She was a very private person, very soft-spoken, genteel, feminine — all those lovely words you associate with great ladies. And yet she had the ability to write this wacky, insane comedy for my mother.
"She and Bob together were just such a wonderful team, a great match-up. They complemented each other's zaniness."
Davis and Carroll, who were along for the "I Love Lucy" show's entire ride, wrote a string of classic episodes such as the ones in which Lucy and Ethel ( Vivian Vance) are chocolate candy dippers trying to contend with a fast-moving conveyor belt, Lucy stomps grapes in Italy, and she gets increasingly drunk doing a TV commercial for the health tonic Vitameatavegamin.
Davis, Carroll and producer-writer Oppenheimer wrote the first four seasons together — more than 125 episodes. Writers Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf joined them in 1955 and, after Oppenheimer left the show in 1956, Davis, Carroll, Schiller and Weiskopf wrote the remaining episodes.
Davis often said that no one involved with "I Love Lucy" had any idea that it would still be watched around the world more than a half-century later.
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