I Love Lucy - Season One (Vol. 1)
The first episodes ofI Love Lucy, in comedy terms, look today like a promising map of great things to come from the hugely influential sitcom.  This set of episodes, the first volume in a definitive collection of the classic television series, includes the original three broadcast episodes from October 1951, plus the so-called "Lost Pilot" that finds the earliestI Love Lucyproduction quite rough but genuinely promising. The actual episodes that American audiences first saw--"The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub," "Be a  Pal," and "The Diet"--find familiar elements of the classic series already in place. Housewife Lucy (Lucille Ball), restless for excitement, is married to Cuban bandleader Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz). Ricky's crazy nightclub career, however, leaves him yearning for a quiet home life and a wife content with her simple chores. Alas, it's not to be. With best friends Ethel (Vivian Vance) and Fred (William Frawley) usually aboard for the Ricardos' misadventures,I Love Lucyintroduced an engaging blend of sophistication and slapstick, all wrapped in the intimacy of a three-camera TV approach. Bonus material is very satisfying, including a radio broadcast from 1951 later adapted into a TV script, a couple of gaffes, guest cast listings, and a new beginning for the second-season rebroadcast of "The Diet."--Tom Keogh