How long did I Love Lucy run?
Marco Rizo
At the end of the war, his childhood friend Desi Arnaz asked Rizo to join him as the pianist and orchestrator for his band, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra. He toured the U.S. with the band until 1950. When Arnaz started production of "I Love Lucy", he once again turned to Rizo, hiring him to be the pianist and orchestrator for the show between 1951 and 1957. Rizo also made several on-camera appearances on the show throughout its run on television.
Contrary to popular belief he did not write the I Love Lucy theme by himself which had music by Rizo, Eliot Daniel and Desi Arnaz with lyrics by Harold Adamson. The lyrics were only heard once on the series in the Season three episode 'Lucy's Last Birthday' made in 1953.
After the "I Love Lucy" show ended, he remained with CBS and was the pianist-arranger for the “Bob Hope Radio Show.”
Television in the United States
Sitcoms are traditionally the most widely syndicated reruns and are usually aired in a five-day-a-week strip (standardly with two episode "runs", separate sets of episodes of a particular program that are usually from different seasons, packaged for stations to air back-to-back or in different time slots), and in most cases, with additional weekend runs consisting of two (or in some cases, four) additional episodes. Marginally performing shows tend to last less than three to five years in broadcast syndication, sometimes moving to cable channels (although rerun packages of some series are sold simultaneously into both broadcast syndication and cable, and sometimes to more than one cable network) or into limited-run barter syndication (such as through The Program Exchange) after the end of their syndication runs, while more widely successful series can have a life in syndication that can run for decades ("I Love Lucy", the first series designed to be rerun, remains popular in syndication more than 60 years after its 1951 debut).