Like just about everyone who grew up at a time when a few networks decided what Americans watched on their television sets, author Todd S. Purdum knew all of the antics of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, the characters played by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, on the ‘50s sitcom “I Love Lucy.”

“It was unavoidable in syndication,” said Purdum, 65, on a recent video call. Although he’s too young to have seen its original run, “I Love Lucy” always seemed to be on.

Lucille Ball as Lucy was the star around whom Arnaz as Ricky, and William Frawley and Vivian Vance as neighbors Fred and Ethel Mertz, orbited in each of the 180 episodes of “I Love Lucy” that originally aired from October 1951 to May 1957.

And it’s Lucy whose voice and visage come first to mind when “I Love Lucy,” which played in reruns for decades after it ended, is remembered today.

Over the years, Purdum gradually learned more about Arna, Ball’s real-life husband. He read his 1976 memoir, “A Book.” He knew elements of his Cuban origins, his reinvention after immigrating to the United States as a teenager, first as the leader of a Latin dance band, later as an actor, his twin careers by the time he met and married Ball in November 1940.

And Purdum knew that Arnaz had played a significant role in the creation of “I Love Lucy” and the formation of Desilu Productions, which in addition to “I Love Lucy” also made many more TV shows including “The Untouchables,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Star Trek.”

“But I didn’t really understand the full depth of the fascinating aspects of his life in Cuba and his family life,” Purdum said. “And then the whole role that he played in the early days of television.”

“Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television” is the book Purdum began in 2020 when the pandemic upended a career in journalism that included several decades as a New York Times reporter followed by stints at Vanity Fair and the Atlantic.

The book rebalances the history of the relationship of Arnaz and Ball, both on screen and off, giving Arnaz’s side of the story in more depth and detail than earlier biographies. It also explores ways in which Arnaz, through good fortune and a canny business sense, changed the making of television in ways that still influence the industry today.

“It seemed, at a moment when the culture was interested in re-examining the lives of people who might have been overlooked in their day, that he would make an interesting subject,” said Purdum of the decision to take up the story he tells in the book.

“And the more I got to know, the more I was impressed.”

Arnaz discovers TV

In many ways, “I Love Lucy” sprang from the desires of Ball and Arnaz to have more time together by collaborating on something with the stability of an ongoing TV show.

Given the success that “I Love Lucy” later found, it might have seemed a small thing to contact the right people, cast the show, and get it on the air. It was, in fact, anything but simple.

The first hurdle, as Purdum writes, was a fear that audiences would not welcome an interracial couple or Arnaz’s accented English into their homes every week.

“One thing I found interesting about Desi was he didn’t take the first ‘no’ as the definitive answer,” Purdum said. “So if CBS said, ‘No, we don’t want this,’ he kept going.”

Arnaz organized a cross-country comedy tour for him and Ball as a kind of proof of concept for the TV show they wanted to make, Purdum said. “Taking the vaudeville tour to do an end-run around them and prove that the audience would accept it, that’s a pretty clever move.”

The network and ad execs who held the purse strings also initially insisted that Arnaz and Ball make the show in New York City, like nearly every other TV show at the time.

There was no easy way to broadcast a show across the continent as television and the 1950s began, so programs aired live from New York in the Eastern and Central time zones, where most of the population then lived, with copies later broadcast to the less-populated Western states.

Arnaz and his team proposed something entirely different for “I Love Lucy.” They would shoot it live in Hollywood with three film cameras simultaneously capturing action on the set. It would quickly be edited and then provided a few days later to air in the entire country in the crisp black-and-white of 35 millimeter film.

“He didn’t do it by himself, but he’s leading the charge that filmed the show with the three-camera system and synchronization,” said Purdum of what remains a standard way of shooting sitcoms.

“This led to filming becoming the norm. And that led to the transfer of the center of the business from New York to L.A.”