Now that Lucille Ball had her first demand met, having her real life husband, Desi Arnaz, star in I Love Lucy, it was time for her second — that the show be filmed in Los Angeles. The problem was, no show had ever been shot in Los Angeles. It was a technical impossibility.

Shows were broadcast from New York, then recorded on kinescopes. A kinescope was a camera that recorded live TV, so the recording could be sent to other markets throughout the country. The quality was terrible. According to the DGA, Phillip Morris, the show’s sponsor, “…objected to making I Love Lucy in Los Angeles. The sponsor in particular didn’t want the lucrative New York and East Coast market, accustomed to quality broadcasts, seeing their show the way the rest of the country saw other shows, on kinescopes.”

So, Arnaz and Ball decided to shoot on film. That way it would always be preserved on a quality format. It’s the reason you can still watch reruns of I Love Lucy to this day. But, film was expensive — more innovation was needed.

According to American Cinematographer, I Love Lucy was a “revolution” of “production methods of motion picture making in Hollywood” for turning out “22 minutes of TV program film in 60 minutes actual shooting time.” This was achieved by creating the “multi-camera format.” The show had adjoined sets — putting all the action in one place, with a studio audience, and shot continuously as if it were a play. They used three cameras simultaneously to record their wide, medium, and close-up shots. “The result is greater speed in the photography of scenes and better results in the final editing” (via American Cinematographer).

During the second season of I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball became pregnant with the couple’s second child, Desi Arnaz, Jr. Desi Arnaz, Sr., wanted to work this into the storyline of the show. But according to The Other Side of Ethel Mertz: The Life Story of Vivian Vance, “Phillip Morris and CBS strongly opposed the idea. In 1952, pregnant women did not readily parade on television…” Eventually CBS and Phillip Morris conceded. By that time I Love Lucy was the number-one-rated show on television, and Ball and Arnaz, Sr., were never the type to back down from a bid.

They were allowed to show Ball being pregnant and talk about her pregnancy but were never allowed to use the word “pregnant.” The episode is called “Lucy is Enceinte” — “enceinte” being French for pregnant. This censorship actually assisted in making the episode fun. Lucy tries to tell Ricky she’s in the family way but is continually blocked and distracted until finally she interrupts Ricky during a performance with his band. Ricky then begins singing, “We’re Having a Baby.”

According to The A.V. Club, “Looking at the viewership numbers garnered by Ball’s onscreen pregnancy, it appears Lucy’s condition was only a moral concern in the eyes of squirrelly executives; audiences clearly loved it…” This arc spanned seven episodes, ending on the finale, “Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” which was a huge event with 44 million viewers. Oddly enough, the following episode was called “Pregnant Women are Unpredictable,” which was “apparently okay because the episode titles never showed on screen,” says The A.V. Club.

The Ricardo’s relationship was not the only one drawing viewers into the show. The partnership between characters Ethel Mertz and Lucy Ricardo was just as fraught with humor and conflict. According to Screen Rant, “They cook up schemes together, support each other when they’re in trouble, and they’re forever joined at the hip. We all want a friendship like Lucy and Ethel’s.”

In an interview with PBS, Kathleen Brady, a Lucille Ball biographer, agrees that the friendship between Ethel and Lucy was the show’s “most enduring influence.” She said it was because it “celebrated the fun and the depth of female friendship.” Their relationship is what inspired a long legacy of TV shows where female friendship is one of, if not the most important theme —shows like Laverne and Shirley, Sex and the City, and Broad City highlight strong female friendships. Girlfriends most likely have Ethel and Lucy to thank for Galentine’s Day. Because of the dynamic of their friendship, according to HuffPost, I Love Lucy “passed the Bechdel Test before it even existed.”

In the well-known and well-loved episode, “Lucy Does a TV Commercial,” Lucy Ricardo wants to prove to her Ricky Ricardo that she is good actress, but he won’t give her a chance. She sneaks onto a commercial set, dismisses the woman who was hired, and takes over her job. Of course it’s immediately funny when she has to pronounce the name of the product, “Vitameatavegamin” — which would be hard to say even if you came prepared. As she pitches the “health tonic” to viewers, she takes sips of it, not realizing one of the main ingredients is grain alcohol. The laughs grow exponentially as she gets more and more inebriated but remains determined to show Ricky she’s good at commercials.

According to Ball on Fire, during the episode “… even Desi had to chew the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing…” Lucille Ball’s talent was undeniable, and yet Desi Arnaz was jealous. Jess Oppenheimer, head writer for the show, is quoted in Ball of Fire as saying, “Desi wasn’t happy in a relationship where his wife had a more powerful reputation than he did.” Ball got all the credit for the show, but she was also far more experienced than Arnaz. Ball of Fire explains, “… all the timing she picked up from her stage work, all the tricks she had learned from the film farces and dramas, from radio shows, from Damon Runyon, Buster Keaton, and Jack Benny, were used to forge the character of Lucy Ricardo.”

The “Grape Stomping” episode is actually called “Lucy’s Italian Movie.” In it, an Italian director wants Lucy to play the role of an American tourist, but she thinks she’s supposed to be a grape stomper. Grape stomping was an outdated and unnecessary practice since vineyards now had machines to squish their grapes. According to Ball on Fire, “Desi managed to find one of the last remaining grape stompers.” He hired her, a woman named Teresa, to play Lucy’s counterpart. Again using another non-actor proved to be an interesting experience on set.

Teresa didn’t speak English and needed a translator to tell her what to do. Lucille Ball recalls, “The time came for us to get in the vat, which was full of real grapes.” She goes on to say, “We started stomping grapes, and I made a dance out of it, and then I slipped.” She accidentally hit Teresa, who in turn, hit her back. Ball says, “She just held me down, hitting me. I thought she was trying to kill me. I had grapes up my nose, up my ears. She was choking me.” No one knew Ball was struggling, as they thought it was all a part of the show. And that Ball would do anything for a laugh.

Fred and Ethel Mertz were unabashedly angry and displeased with each other on screen, and that’s why audiences loved them. But the actors, Vivian Vance and William Frawley, hated each other in real life too. Vance came from Broadway and thought she was better than Frawley, who came from Broadway as well but spent the majority of his career as a character actor starring in over a hundred films. According to The Other Side of Ethel Mertz: The Life Story of Vivian Vance, Vance said, “How can anyone believe that I’d be married to that old coot…” What Frawley said in response is not safe for prime-time television. Frawley had a bad reputation for drinking and being unprofessional, but he was a great actor, so they kept him around.

Hedda Hopper, the scariest gossip columnist in Hollywood, was friends with Lucille Ball and was able to keep any unfavorable press about the I Love Lucy cast out of print. According to The Other Side of Ethel Mertz: The Life Story of Vivian Vance, the studio instead wrote press releases that said things like, “Vivian, Bill and the Arnazes have a four-way admiration society.” And they’d quote Vance saying, “Bill is a darling.” No one knew for years about the constant bickering behind the scenes.

In 1989, CBS unearthed an old I Love Lucy Christmas special and aired it. The ratings were terrific, prompting a search for other missing episodes. In 1951, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball shot their own pilot in a studio in New York, but it never aired. It was recorded on a kinescope. According to a 1990 article in The Washington Post, “Arnaz apparently had given a print of the episode to Pepito, a clown who’s featured in the show. Pepito’s widow discovered it and gave it to B. Donald (Bud) Grant, the former CBS Entertainment president who now runs Grant/Tribune Productions, and is producing the special that includes it.”

CBS aired the special on April 30 1990. According to AP News, “By a CBS estimate, 40 million viewers saw, ‘I Love Lucy: The Very First Show,’ a Monday special featuring the 34-minute pilot, which Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz filmed in black and white at their own expense on March 10, 1951.” It was hosted by Lucie Arnaz, Ball and Arnaz’s first child, whom Ball was pregnant with in that very first episode.

The first pilot never aired because the show was drastically changed after landing Phillip Morris as a sponsor. The initial pilot had Arnaz’s agent as a main character, which was later cut because it, “would skew the program away from the couple and toward Desi,” writes Stefan Kanfer in Ball on Fire. They made Lucy and Desi Ricardo more working class and relatable, and added Fred and Ethel Mertz as their neighbors to make the version of I Love Lucy that known today.

In 1960, when the stress of the show and their marriage had been enough, Lucille Ball filed for a divorce from Desi Arnaz. Arnaz and Ball shared their last kiss on the last episode of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. Ball went on to run Desilu, helping produce shows like The Untouchables and Star Trek. While Ball has received a lot of fanfare for being a “girlboss,” her biggest dream was to be a housewife.

According to PBS, “Lucille herself did not want to be seen as a lady executive… In her first interview as the head of Desilu Studios, she dusted her office as she talked about the company’s plans for the future.” It seemed throughout all her success, all she ever wanted was Arnaz and for their family to be together. When her film career was failing and she was deciding what to do next, before signing on to do My Dear Husband, she said, “Of all the thirty or forty films I had made up to that time, I could find only find three or four scenes in those pictures that I cared anything about… I discovered they were domestic scenes where I portrayed a housewife,” as per The “I Love Lucy” Book.