Overrated I love Lucille Ball, but must I love “I Love Lucy”? Many did. When Eisenhower was inaugurated, in January of 1953, 29 million people watched; a day later Lucy gave birth to Little Ricky, and 44 million watched. That statistic genuinely frightened fifties mass-media critics, who had suspected that Americans would always turn out in bigger numbers to be entertained than to celebrate their collective democratic power. But could 44 million Americans have been wrong?

How good was “I Love Lucy”? It was never as sublime as its contemporary “The George Burns Show,” never as psychologically acute as “Leave It to Beaver,” never as funny as “Sergeant Bilko.” The real pleasure of the series wasn’t wit but something creepier, the audience’s understanding of a difference between what “Lucy” presented on the surface and what they presumed to be happening behind the scenes.

By today’s standards, the surface of the show is bad enough. Looming large are values about women’s roles that don’t quicken our inclination to laugh. In the pilot episode Ricky tells Lucy, “I don’t want my wife in show business. . . . all you got to do is clean the house for me, hand me my pipe when I come home at night, cook for me, and be the mother for my children.” For the rest of the series, try as hard as she might to connive her way into show business, Lucy always ended up back in an apron.

But beneath this Formica veneer was a fact not lost on any viewer in America: Lucy and Ricky Ricardo were really Lucy and Desi Arnaz. Who didn’t know they were married in real life? If anyone was using the other to make it in show biz, it was Desi, a successful but not particularly celebrated musician, using Lucy, an MGM star since the late 1930s. What viewers imagined was happening behind the show (power struggles of a more realistic sort) added to their voyeuristic pleasure.

Ball’s creative dominance of the show encouraged the producers and writers to make plot and character development secondary to creating situations that would highlight her gifts for physical comedy. The much-replayed scenes (Lucy madly stomping grapes into wine, Lucy failing as a TV huckster of Vegameat-avitamin, Lucy and Ethel unable to keep up with the candy on a conveyor belt) typically end only when Lucy herself lets out her famous wail of despair.

This kind of hysteria went the way of women behind bars and Cold War allegory creature features; we like our comedy cooler and campier now. We may still love “Lucy,” but it’s more nostalgia than enthusiasm for anything intrinsic to the show.

Underrated “Congratulations. I still hate your f——g show, but the audience seems to love it, so we’re putting it on.” Thus read a telegram from the president of CBS, the “Tiffany network,” to Sherwood Schwartz,