Vivian Vance's character on "The Lucy Show" was the first divorced person on TV

Crazy that Sherwood Schwartz wasn't allowed to make Carol Brady a divorcee 7 years later. Though Florence Henderson always said she had her previous husband killed.

R1 I think the censors allowed Viv to be divorced because she wasn't remarried. I don't have time to fully research it, but I think she might just have been the first divorced character on a primetime series. I'm sure one of the dozens of daytime soaps that had aired prior to it had to have had a divorced character or two.

Wasn’t Lucy’s character divorced as well?

That Vivian Vance was quite the trail-blazer!

R3 No, Lucy was a widow. But, the show was very loosely based on Irene Kampen's book Life Without George, in which both females are divorced.

So Ann Romano wasn't all that groundbreaking after all.

R5 Well, Viv never went braless. I was going to let her, but Gary talked me out of it.

Yes, and allowing this on TV marked the beginning of the downward slide of America’s morality into the cesspool it is today.

I thought she had Fred Mertz killed for the insurance money and to gain title to that apartment building....