Lucille Ball quickly became the nation’s favorite redhead, thanks to the amazing success of perhaps the most iconic show to ever be produced for television, I Love Lucy. When the show ended its enormously successful six-year run in 1957, the gang of Lucy, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance and William Frawley remained together to produce a series of one-hour specials that ran into the next decade, as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. From that point, Desi was pretty much done with television acting, and Frawley was appearing on the sitcom My Three Sons. Lucy and Vivian therefore decided to go at it alone in an all-new series called The Lucy Show, which debuted on CBS in 1962.

This time around, there was no hotheaded Cuban bandleader for a husband; in fact, there was no husband at all. Lucy Carmichael was a recent widow and mother of two children who shared a home in Connecticut with a divorced friend named Vivian Bagley (Vance.) Left with a rather sizable trust fund after her husband’s death, her biggest adversary was the local banker who managed and controlled her remaining wealth. The following year, he was replaced by the inimitable Mr. Mooney (actor Gale Gordon, who Ball worked with extensively throughout her career) who was even more adamant about making sure that the widow didn’t spend all of her funds on some hare-brained scheme she had thought up. And just like the previous series, Lucy was never at a loss for one of these schemes, all of which were carried out with the help of her ever-faithful friend Viv.

Eventually, Lucy went to work for the same bank as Mooney’s secretary, right about the time that Vivian Vance decided to leave the series. The entire show was then picked up and relocated from Connecticut to Los Angeles. Lucy and her son Jerry moved out west, along with Mr. Mooney and daughter Chris went off to college, never to be seen again. Luckily for Lucy, her old friend Vivian came to visit every once in a while. Lucy and Mooney got jobs at local banks, just not the same ones, and eventually, her son was shipped off to a military academy. Luckily, Lucy now had a new best friend, Mary Jane Lewis, to get sucked into her crazy schemes.

The Lucy Show was an enormous success for all of the six seasons it aired and featured plenty of famous guest star cameos over the years, from the likes of George Burns, Dean Martin, Joan Crawford, Jack Benny, Carol Burnett, Milton Berle and many others. In 1967, Lucille Ball sold her production company, Desilu Productions, and as a result, didn’t want to appear on a show she no longer owned. So, she simply repeated what had worked the last time one of her series ended, she grabbed a friend, this time Gale Gordon, and moved on to her next successful series, Here’s Lucy, which debuted the following year.