What attracted audiences—sometimes over 50 million—to the show was, as everyone agrees, Lucille Ball herself. The show revolved around serial failure: Lucy's desperate wish for a career in show business; she would do anything, no matter how ridiculous, to get her foot in the door. Invariably, for one reason or another, her plots would fall apart. But if her schemes failed, Ball's performance succeeded brilliantly as spectacle. The medium was made for personalities.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 449