TV Talk: If you love Lucy, you’ll probably tolerate ‘Being the Ricardos’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Amazon’s Aaron Sorkin-written-and-directed “Being the Ricardos,” now in theaters and streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video Dec. 21, is … fine.

Fans of Sorkin’s rat-a-tat-tat “The West-Wing”-style dialogue will see it expressed most directly during an “I Love Lucy” table read – shades of Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” — where Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda), who plays Ethel on “I Love Lucy,” and William Frawley (J.K. Simmons, perfectly cast), who plays Ethel’s husband Fred, start sniping at one another.

But the main attraction is the title characters, Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and husband Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), known to millions as their characters, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo on the 1951-57 sitcom “I Love Lucy.”

Kidman’s casting came under the most scrutiny and deservedly so. To her credit, Kidman actually sounds and looks like Lucy Ricardo in re-created scenes from the classic sitcom, but when she’s not filming “I Love Lucy” scenes, Kidman sounds like, well, Nicole Kidman. Ball was born in Jamestown, N.Y., so while her Western New York accent may have been elevated for comedic effect when she was playing Lucy, it’s difficult to imagine that distinctive long-A sound went away completely off-camera, yet that’s how Kidman plays it. (Kidman’s native Australian accent mostly stays tucked away, certainly more so in this role than in some of her recent TV series appearances.)

As Desi, who is decidedly the sitcom’s sidekick and not the star (the show’s title is notably not “Desi Loves Lucy”), Bardem’s casting surely received less second-guessing than Kidman’s. Bardem’s Desi is less suave and polished than the man he plays, but Bardem delivers a credible performance all the same. The show’s secondary character actors get their moments as the film delves into Vance’s resentment of having to play frumpy while Ball glams it up.

Sorkin takes elements from different periods of time and has them all occur in a single week in “Being the Ricardos.” It feels like too much.

From Lucy’s suspicions about Desi’s affairs to Lucy’s pregnancy and whether CBS and sponsor Phillip Morris will allow the pregnancy to be incorporated into the TV show, to Lucy’s distant past as a Communist party member (done to please the grandfather who raised her), it’s near-bedlam on the “I Love Lucy” set.

“Being the Ricardos” sets Lucy up as the brains of the operation, the smartest person in the room, the one who questions character motivation in “Lucy” scripts and has to beg the show’s executive producer (Tony Hale) to give Desi an EP credit. It’s a very Sorkin-esque approach, as is the framing device of documentary-style interviews with many of the “Lucy” writers in their twilight years.

And it’s all …. fine, an OK behind-the-scenes look at the couple who made one of TV’s all-time best comedies. But “Being the Ricardos” is not an awards-worthy classic of cinema; it’s several notches in quality above those Lifetime BTS movies like “The Unauthorized Beverly Hills, 90210 Story,” but still in the same ballpark.

That said, if “Being the Ricardos” encourages a new generation to check out “Lucy” episodes (available on Paramount+) then the film will justify its reason to exist.