'I Love Lucy' Co-Creator Dies

Bob Carroll Jr. worked on every episode of classic sitcom
January 30, 2007


'I Love Lucy'TV writer Bob Carroll Jr., who co-created the classic sitcom "I Love Lucy" and worked on all 180 of its episodes, has died.



Carroll, 87, died Saturday (Jan. 27) at his Los Angeles home of natural causes. He'd been in ill health for the past few weeks.

After first teaming with Lucille Ball on her radio show "My Favorite Husband," Carroll, writing partner Madelyn Pugh Davis and another writer, Jess Oppenheimer, co-created "I Love Lucy" in 1951. The show ran through 1957, pretty much setting the template for all sitcoms to follow, including the tradition of filming in front of a live audience and selling reruns into syndication.

Carroll, Davis and Oppenheimer worked on all 180 episodes of the series, turning out as many as 35 shows per season (and never fewer than 26 in a year).

"Working with Bob was great because we shared the same sense of humor," Davis tells The Hollywood Reporter. "We never got into an argument about what we were going to do. All the pictures I have of us, I'm always laughing."

Carroll continued to work with Ball on several shows after "I Love Lucy," including "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," "The Lucy Show," "Here's Lucy" and "Life With Lucy." He and Davis also co-wrote the script for the feature film "Yours, Mine and Ours" (which starred Ball and Henry Fonda) and worked on several other series, including "The Mothers-in-Law" and "Alice."

The Writers Guild of America honored Carroll and Davis with its Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for television writing in 1992. He was nominated for two Emmys, in 1956 for "I Love Lucy" and 1971 for an episode of "Here's Lucy."