Greg, much of Being the Ricardos pivots on the cast of I Love Lucy rehearsing an episode where the Mertz’s are arguing with each other. Lucy is clashing with the director, Donald Glass, over the details of the dinner scene – for example, whether they should be seated at the dinner table and whether Lucy should be cutting flowers for the centerpiece. There is tension over seeming minutia.

“Something fundamental is wrong, I’ll figure out what,” says Lucy. This scene in the movie – and the TV series within the movie – represents a microcosm of Lucy’s personality along with her life ambitions and dreams. She knows what she wants and will do whatever it takes, including micro-managing her environment, to build a proper “home” – a place where she and Ricky are together, a place with flowers on the dinner table, flowers cut exactly the “right” way.

Desi Arnaz doesn’t get it and tells her that he is baffled by her obsession with the details of the scene, especially the part about getting the flowers just right. Lucy is determined to make this dinner scene “work”, to build a home right there on the set of the number one TV show in America. But no matter what she does, forces beyond her control conspire to make this home-building impossible. She may be the smartest person in the room, but if others don’t share her vision, she’ll have to make compromises to the detriment of achieving her dream – which is exactly what happens in this particular episode and throughout her entire life.

It’s scenes like this in Being the Ricardos that make this film very much worth watching. Lucille Ball was a once-in-a-generation talent operating in a patriarchal world that constantly placed limits on her creative genius. But more importantly, it placed limits on her dream of simply being married and having a family. Desi Arnaz was a man of his generation – a hugely successful man who felt threatened by Lucy’s success and believed he was entitled to his own life with other women outside of his marriage to Lucy.

Lucille Ball was a force of nature, always the smartest person in the room, and always doomed to butt up against the hyper-patriarchal world of the 1950s. She took risks, made sacrifices, and blazed new trails. For these reasons, she’s a great hero, one of my favorites in fact.

Greg, I was also going to mention the awkwardness of inserting every issue the series faced within the few days that transpired in this story. There is Ethel’s resentment about maintaining a particular weight, her problem with her character being married to Fred, Lucy’s dealings with the communism issue, Desi’s philandering, Desi’s insecurity about playing second fiddle to Lucy, the TV pregnancy issue, and more. It felt very contrived and could have been better handled by extending the timeline of the story over a few years rather than a few days.

But Greg I do feel that this story did need to be told. For one thing, Lucille Ball was an extraordinary pioneer in the television industry and deserves tremendous credit and recognition for breaking gender barriers on screen and in the boardroom. Not everyone knows the details of her personal and professional life, especially now that we are 70 years removed from the airing of her groundbreaking series. New generations of fans needed a modern portrayal of her life and times.

Lucy’s heroism was unprecedented, and we can see that she possessed all eight of the “Great Eight Traits” of heroes – she was smart, strong, charismatic, reliable, caring, resilient, selfless, and inspiring. She took risks and made sacrifices. She was even willing to lose her career in admitting that she deliberately checked the “communism” box in honor of her grandfather. Desi’s tragic personal experience with Cuban communists stopped her from self-destructing.

This film definitely deserves a rating of 4 out of 5 Reels. The full five Reels could have been achieved with a screenplay that captured a longer, more realistic timeline for proper development of the many issues confronting Lucy and the series. In terms of the hero rating, Lucille Ball most certainly deserves all 5 hero points out of 5.