The BEST episodes of I Love Lucy season 3
Every episode of I Love Lucy season 3, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of I Love Lucy season 3!
Cuban Bandleader Ricky Ricardo would be happy if his wife Lucy would just be a housewife. Instead she tries constantly to perform at the Tropicana where he works, and make life comically frantic in the apartment building they share with landlords Fred and Ethel Mertz, who also happen to be their best friends.
#1 - Ricky's Hawaiian Vacation
Season 3 - Episode 22 - Aired 3/15/1954
Ricky's band is to play in Hawaii-and guess who wants to go also? Lucy's plan: to go on a game show that gives away airline tickets. It calls for some trickery, and Lucy just *might* meet her match in the show's host, Freddie Fillmore, a prankster par excellence.
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#2 - Sentimental Anniversary
Season 3 - Episode 16 - Aired 2/1/1954
Lucy and Ricky want to spend their 13th wedding anniversary alone, but the Mertzes have another idea: a surprise party.
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#3 - Equal Rights
Season 3 - Episode 4 - Aired 10/26/1953
Lucy and Ethel demand equal rights for women. Okay, say Ricky and Fred at the restaurant: separate checks for the four of them. Thus begins Lucy and Ethel's careers as restaurant dishwashers. So they plot revenge: they'll scare their husbands by claiming to have been robbed.
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#4 - Lucy Has Her Eyes Examined
Season 3 - Episode 11 - Aired 12/14/1953
Lucy finally gets her chance to be in show business, when she tricks Ricky into letting her do the "Jitterbug" in one of his shows. She's terrific during rehearsals, but problems occur when Lucy accompanies Ricky (who's been suffering from headaches) to the eye doctor just before the show. There, the doctor decides to examine Lucy's eyes, as well. He puts some eyedrops in Lucy's eyes which "relaxes" them, but Lucy's vision is blurry for the next twenty four hours. Naturally, this causes problems since Lucy has to perform that night.
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#5 - The Charm School
Season 3 - Episode 15 - Aired 1/25/1954
It's time for charm school for Lucy and Ethel when their men eye a pretty woman at a party. But Ricky and Fred are anything but charmed by the results.
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#6 - The Golf Game
Season 3 - Episode 30 - Aired 5/17/1954
Championship golfer Jimmy Demaret visits the Ricardos when Lucy and Ethel arrive at a bizarre scheme for combating their "golf widowship." The girls install a basketball court in the Ricardo living room and pretend to be as deeply absorbed in the game as their husbands are in the fairways.
#7 - The Diner
Season 3 - Episode 27 - Aired 4/26/1954
The Ricardos and the Mertzes buy a diner, name it "A Little Bit of Cuba" and go to work. Well, the Mertzes go to work; the Ricardos "greet." Not surprisingly, relations are soon strained. Can a food fight be far behind?
#8 - Home Movies
Season 3 - Episode 20 - Aired 3/1/1954
Ricky's home movies move the Mertzes to walk out, and prompt Lucy, Fred and Ethel to make a movie of their own, a "Western musical drama" shot in the Ricardo living room. But that's not to mixed up with a TV pilot Ricky's making, is it?
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#9 - Too Many Crooks
Season 3 - Episode 9 - Aired 11/30/1953
Lucy sneaks into the Mertzes' apartment to borrow one of Fred's suits so that she can order him a custom-made tweed suit for his birthday. This leads Ethel to think that Lucy is the notorious neighborhood burglar, "Madame X", and she goes spying on her friend to prove it.
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#10 - Ricky's 'Life' Story
Season 3 - Episode 1 - Aired 10/5/1953
Lucy is upset because a 'Life' magazine feature on Ricky's home life didn't include a picture of her.
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#11 - Fan Magazine Interview
Season 3 - Episode 17 - Aired 2/8/1954
A reporter for a fan magazine, Eleanor Harris, spends an "average day" with the Ricardos. Of course, it's anything BUT average for the happily married couple. And they might not be one so happily married, thanks to a publicity stunt that Ricky's agent Jerry has cooked up.
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#12 - The Sublease
Season 3 - Episode 31 - Aired 5/24/1954
The Ricardos are off to Maine for the summer, so they decide to sublet their apartment. Their landlords, the Mertzes, don't like the idea, and like the potential tenants even less. Nor are they wild about their new roommates.
#13 - The Million Dollar Idea
Season 3 - Episode 13 - Aired 1/11/1954
The Ricardo household budget is in shambles (as usual) after Lucy decides to put her salad dressing on the market. Her plan? To market it on a TV morning show on the station her friend Caroline Appleby's husband runs. Home economist Mary Margaret McMertz (Ethel) will invite "an average housewife," (Lucy) to taste the dressing on the air.
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#14 - Lucy Tells the Truth
Season 3 - Episode 6 - Aired 11/9/1953
Ricky and the Mertzes bet Lucy that she can't go twenty-four hours without telling a lie. The outcome? Lucy insults all her friends and has to admit her real age, weight, and hair color. But she nearly gets a part on a TV show, by telling the truth, more or less.
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#15 - Lucy is Envious
Season 3 - Episode 23 - Aired 3/29/1954
Lucy's past fibs to her rich and snotty ex-schoolmate are about to catch up with her when she unwittingly pledges $500 to a charity drive. In order to come up with the money, she and Ethel agree to a publicity stunt that puts them on top of the Empire State Building posing as women from Mars.
#16 - Tennessee Ernie Hangs On
Season 3 - Episode 29 - Aired 5/10/1954
Lucy gets sick of an extensive visit by Tennessee Ernie, who claims he is her cousin. She tries to get rid of the likable character by pleading poverty. The scheme backfires when Tennessee Ernie promotes a benefit hoedown to assist Lucy and Ricky. Look for "Ernie Ford and His Four Hot Chicken Pickers" in this episode.
#17 - The French Revue
Season 3 - Episode 7 - Aired 11/16/1953
Ricky is planning a French revue for the club, and since Lucy is determined to be in it, she hires a Frenchman to coach her. When Ricky forbids her to come near the place, she tries various disguises, and finally succeeds as a chorus girl.
#18 - Lucy Writes a Novel
Season 3 - Episode 24 - Aired 4/5/1954
Lucy writes a novel in which the characters are thinly-veiled caricatures of Ricky, Fred and Ethel. Too thinly veiled, Ricky, Fred and Ethel think. So they burn it. But not before Lucy gets a copy to a publisher.
#19 - Baby Pictures
Season 3 - Episode 5 - Aired 11/2/1953
The Ricardos and the Applebys always brag to each other about their little sons. But when Lucy's and Caroline Appeby's exhanges turn hostile and sarcastic, Ricky worries that it will jeapordize a TV job that's been offered to him by Caroline's husband.
#20 - Ricky Minds the Baby
Season 3 - Episode 14 - Aired 1/18/1954
Ricky agrees to watch is son, but while Daddy is engrossed in a football game, Little Ricky wanders off. Lucy finds him in the hallway, and calls Ricky to ask where the baby is. Panicking, Ricky searches everywhere, before Lucy walks in with his son.
#21 - Tennessee Ernie Visits
Season 3 - Episode 28 - Aired 5/3/1954
The corn starts popping when Tennessee Ernie Ford comes to visit in Part 1 of a two-part episode. He's Lucy's "Cousin" Ernest, an earnest young man from Bent Fork, Tenn., who knows nothing of city ways and is inadvertently infuriating. He's got to go but he's so sweet that they can't just throw him out. What to do? Lucy will pose as a wicked city woman, and "vamp" him out of town.
#22 - Redecorating the Mertzes' Apartment
Season 3 - Episode 8 - Aired 11/23/1953
It's redecorating time at the Mertzes', and Lucy and Ricky volunteer to help. But when Fred turns on a fan as Lucy is unstuffing a chair, the paint and feathers they were using go flying. Lucy feels responsible for the ruined furniture, so she gives Ethel her own living room furniture as a gift.
#23 - The Black Wig
Season 3 - Episode 26 - Aired 4/19/1954
Lucy plays a black-wigged temptress to test Ricky's fidelity. The result makes makes her see red so she schemes to get even. But she won't divorce him. Ethel agrees: "Yeah, stay married to him," she says. "That'll teach him."
#24 - Ricky Loses His Temper
Season 3 - Episode 19 - Aired 2/22/1954
Ricky explodes when Lucy buys an expensive hat. She offers to return it, and bets him he'll lose his cool over something else before she buys another hat. But no matter what she does to provoke him, the hot-tempered Cuban remains unruffled.
#25 - Changing the Boys' Wardrobe
Season 3 - Episode 10 - Aired 12/7/1953
Lucy and Ethel are disgusted by their husbands' old clothes, so they secretly give them away to a secondhand store. Unfortunately for them, the boys find out about their plan, and buy everything back. Later on, Ricky learns that a magazine has named Fred and him as two of the "Best-Dressed Men in New York City." He and Fred, dressed in tuxedos, invite the girls to meet them at the club for pictures. The girls arrive in their grubbiest attire.