TV Reviews : ‘Lucy & Desi’: A Love-Hate Scenario

“Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8) arrives with considerable anticipation. Industry insiders, “Lucy” fans and media vultures can feast on the love/hate scenario here.

The show has already engendered the outrage of daughter Lucie Arnaz, who got in the first critical lick, calling it “fiction.” That’s a daughter’s right. But let’s put it this way: In the story’s grueling, relentless infidelity theme, Lucille Ball comes off as helplessly lovesick, and the rakish, straw-hatted Cuban Desi Arnaz is a cad.

They meet as actors on the set of a 1940 movie called “Too Many Girls” (a prophetic title). “You’re Dizzy, aren’t you?” asks the aggressive Ball. Double-entendres follow. It’s the start of a whirlwind romance and five-and-dime sexual betrayals by Desi (six years younger and a culture apart).

But talk about a show with a split personality. If you rub the suds out of your eyes and watch with a sense of Hollywood history, the production imaginatively charts the events on the first day of filming (Sept. 8, 1951) of that pioneering godmother of sitcoms, “I Love Lucy.”

Writers William Luce and Cynthia Cherbak had plenty of biographical material to work from--we’re not talking the Dead Sea Scrolls here. They unfortunately devote too much agonizing to the clash between Arnaz’s irrepressible libido and Ball’s fear of losing him to another woman. As Ball says to her mom at one point: “Letting Desi get near those Copa girls is like giving a drunk the key to the liquor cabinet.”

The story covers the first 11 years of their stormy marriage and stops on the eve of the first flush of success of “I Love Lucy.” A series of flashbacks (cued by almost comical, pregnant, endless stares into the past) frame the years 1940-51. In this telling, Ball struggles to move out of radio onto TV not to put on a funny show but as a means to save her marriage.

Her fierce fight on Arnaz’s behalf--network nabobs didn’t think the public would buy an American redhead married to a Cuban--is Ball’s most endearing quality.

The live audience and sound stage at Desilu Studios, and the whole 1940s Hollywood look, are deliciously re-created by production designer Trevor Williams and costume designer May Routh.

At least director Charles Jarrott had the fortune to cast an actress who embodies the wisecracking, scatterbrained aura of the Queen of the B’s. Frances Fisher’s wide-eyed Ball is pert and expressive. Her live-stage clown act as a warm-up to her “Lucy” pilot and her black-and-white reproductions of a classic “Lucy” kitchen episode are the movie’s sweetest moments.

Maurice Benard’s shorter, shoulder-swaying lothario catches the boyish charm of a ba-ba-loo bongo player. Benard also conveys in the “Lucy” acts the subtle, skillful Arnaz timing that was easily overlooked. Arnaz’s curse, the script suggests, was playing second fiddle. His flights from the nest are brushed with an emotional base--Ball was the talent and clout in this family, and he knew it.

What redeems the movie is its patina, amidst the dross, of broadcast history. This couple changed the face of television--where production was shot (henceforth in Hollywood instead of New York), how it was shot (for the first time with three cameras before a live audience and on film)--and they pioneered the financially rewarding rerun. Mid-20th Century America didn’t have a more famous couple.