Lucille Ball lived a one-of-a-kind life. I Love Lucy is one of the most adored and influential sitcoms of all-time (it holds up shockingly well 60 years later), and the first television series to show an interracial couple. She was the first woman to run a major Hollywood studio, Desilu Productions. And as Nicole Kidman-as-Lucy says in the teaser trailer for Being the Ricardos above, she was the “biggest asset in the portfolio” of both the Columbia Broadcasting System and Philip Morris Tobacco Westinghouse.
Being the Ricardos is written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, who was drawn to Lucy and husband Desi Arnaz’s life story because “the only thing better than a story people don’t know is a story that people think they know but they’re wrong,” he told EW. “There were plenty of points of friction, and that’s what I look for when I want to tell a story. I had this structural idea that appealed to me. I like claustrophobic spaces; I like claustrophobic segments of time. So I thought if I could tell the story during one production week of I Love Lucy — Monday table read through Friday audience taping — and tell it mostly on that soundstage, that there might be something good there. So I tried writing it.”
Being the Ricardos, which also stars Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, J.K. Simmons as William Frawley, Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance, Tony Hale as Jess Oppenheimer, Alia Shawkat as Madelyn Pugh, hits Amazon Prime Video on December 21.
