Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz’s Daughter Working on Series Spanning Their Lives
What To Know
- Lucie Arnaz, daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, is developing a three-season series about her parents’ lives, careers, and complicated relationship.
- The series will be based on their autobiographies and aims to cover their rise to fame, marriage, and eventual divorce.
- Producers plan to pitch the show to networks and streaming services, emphasizing that the story includes both the iconic success of I Love Lucy and the personal struggles behind the scenes.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz‘s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, is working on a series spanning the I Love Lucy stars’ lives.
On December 10, Variety reported that Lucie is teaming up with Bob Greenblatt to develop a three-season show about her parents’ rise to stardom, complicated relationship while filming the iconic sitcom, and eventual divorce. Richard LaGravenese has been tapped to create the series based on the autobiographies written by Arnaz and Ball.
“If you’re really willing to look at the whole thing, there’s quite a story there, and a lot to be learned,” Lucie said. “It’s very emotional, and it’s not what people think. It’s not just all about I Love Lucy.”
The working title for the series is Lucy and Desi: The Greatest Story Never Told, and Lucie and Greenblatt told Variety they plan to begin meeting with networks and streaming services in the next several months.
“As we take it to buyers, there’s a version of this that could be 10 hours and done, if somebody wants to jump in with that,” Greenblatt said. “But we want to present it as a multi-season show. We think it’s three seasons of eight episodes.”
Everett Collection
He called Ball and Arnaz’s story “extraordinary,” from the beginning, “when they’re each teenagers in their separate worlds — one being Cuba as it’s coming apart at the seams, and one being very WASPy New York.”
“They were both thrust out on their own, quickly at a young age, to try to figure out who they were and find their way in the business,” Greenblatt explained. “Then they converge in 1940 on a soundstage at RKO, doing a movie together. I Love Lucy is 11 years later, but that’s 11 years when they’re together in a marriage that’s up and down and complex.”
In 2016, I Love Lucy will celebrate its 75th anniversary. The show debuted in October 1951 and ran for six seasons until 1957.
“The story is not all ha-ha,” Lucie noted. “There’s a lot of sadness, there’s addiction, and there’s cheating, and there’s lots of fights for no reason. There’s something to be learned from what they went through and how it’s not that easy to have it all.”