12I LOVE LUCY

Aired: CBS, 1951-1956

Though the show won an Emmy as Best Comedy, the writers were never so honored (in fairness, the Emmy for sitcom writing didn't exist until 1955). The five writers Jess Oppenheimer, the writing team of Madelyn Pugh Davis and Bob Carroll Jr., and later the team of Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf churned out 181 episodes. Tom Gilbert, writing in The New York Times after Davis' death in 2011, noted that as the lone "girl writer," Davis had to type up scripts but was also called on to test out some of Lucy's more outlandish stunts (think a chocolate dipping assembly line). Of the relationship between Davis and Lucille Ball, Gilbert wrote: "They were for the purposes at hand the perfect complement to each other."