I hate I Love Lucy

This isn't a comedy. It's a horror show.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz on set
(Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It was when Ricky announced to a cringing Lucy that he'd keep their new couch in his office until she paid him for it with "her allowance" that I wondered whether I Love Lucy had somehow, in the decades since TV's defining sitcom first aired, switched genres from comedy to horror. How was this anxiety-laced scenario — which ends with a humiliated, badly-permed Lucy wearing an ugly dress she tried to make for herself to save money and adoring her husband for "forgiving" her — funny?

The situation in this episode — "Lucy Wants New Furniture" — is fairly typical fare: Lucille Ball's Lucy finds a good deal for a new couch and coffee table and buys them without telling Desi Arnaz's Ricky, who (when she raises the point) forbids it. It's too late, so Lucy hides the couch in the kitchen, blocking her own access to the room; she can only get there through Ethel's apartment. As with so many of Lucy's plans, this one is dumb: The old couch is gone and the kitchen table is now in the living room, so Ricky would be an idiot not to suspect something. He does. And he punishes her: first by making her run back and forth to the kitchen through Ethel's apartment to fetch him things as she waits on him at table, next by telling her that he knows the truth and she'll have to pay him back, and finally by forbidding her to get her hair done, suggesting she make a dress instead of buying one, and taking the new couch to his office until she repays him. Once she's failed to his satisfaction, he benevolently announces her "debt" to him canceled. All is well by the end of the episode — by which I mean that Lucy is so grateful to be forgiven by the man she's spent the episode waiting on, it almost makes your molars ache.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.