ROB LONG: Tales of a Cuban Television Revolutionary.

Desi Arnaz, the Cuban-born bandleader, singer, husband to Lucille Ball, was also (I learned that day) the entrepreneurial inventor of the multibillion-dollar business of American sitcoms. It was Desi who figured out that old episodes had big rerun value—he discovered residuals, in other words—and it was Desi who figured if you put three cameras on dollies you could film an episode in one night in front of a live audience, like a short stage play. Desi took a business that was slow and expensive and made it fast and cheap, and the result was 189 episodes of I Love Lucy and subsequent downstream variations like The Lucy Show and Here’s Lucy, but also a rock-solid business model that allowed studios to invest in young and clueless comedy writers (ahem) and wait for them to figure it out. Desi Arnaz, in other words, who died in 1986, helped me buy my first house in 1997.

There’s a lot more to the story, of course, and in his absorbing and well-paced biography of Desi Arnaz, Todd Purdum manages to keep it detailed but moving along. He describes the way Arnaz outwitted CBS network executives when it came to things like fees and creative control. There’s a riveting section where he explains how Arnaz maneuvered his way to the purchase of the old RKO studio lot on Gower Street in Hollywood, a move that allowed Desilu Studios, the enterprise he shared with his then-wife, Lucille Ball, to expand their creative output. Under Desi’s stewardship, Desilu produced Star Trek, Mannix, Mission: Impossible, The Untouchables, and every one of Lucy’s sitcoms.

Desilu was eventually purchased by Paramount Studios, which owned the production lot next door, and the two physical studios were combined. When I walked onto the Paramount lot in January 1990 for my first day as a staff writer on Cheers, I was actually walking onto the old Desilu lot. My office was in the Lucille Ball building, next to the flight of stairs where, I was told, Lucy shouted down to Desi that she wanted a divorce. George Wendt, who sadly died not long ago, had a dressing room lined with cedar panels. Before he took on the role of Norm in Cheers, his dressing room had been Lucy’s cedar closet. The partnership between Lucy and Desi rippled through all of my television career—not just my paycheck, but my work environment as well.

Read the whole thing.