Before Amy Poehler was attached to direct a new documentary from Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment about the first couple of television — Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz — the original idea was to explore Ball’s achievements as a performer and businesswoman who shattered the glass ceiling.

But Lucie Arnaz, Ball and Arnaz’s daughter, who has long managed her parents’ estate, wasn’t keen on the estate entering the partnership under that framing.

“I said, ‘That’s not gonna fly with us,’” recalls Arnaz, who also was involved in the making of the recent biopic “Being the Ricardos.” “It seemed disingenuous because my mother didn’t really enjoy that. And she didn’t ask for that. She didn’t want that. And she got rid of that as quick as she could. So I said: If you start up that road, you’re gonna hit a wall. We finally decided what the focus should be — the relationship between the two of them and how brilliant it was, and this amazing thing they created. But how come they couldn’t make it work? Because they did stay together [as] soulmates for a long, long time — until they died, basically.”

When Howard finally did approach Poehler about her interest in directing it, the multihyphenate funnywoman wondered how she could find her way into the beloved “I Love Lucy” couple who have received plenty of appraisal in various formats through the decades. Arnaz had contributed to the catalog herself nearly 30 years ago with a scrapbook film called “Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie,” featuring interviews with the family and friends who knew her parents the best.

“There’s been lots and lots of coverage of Lucy and Desi,” says Poehler. “So it was really about: What would be a new way in or a way that, creatively, felt like the right thing?”

Her solution became focused on deconstructing the outsized “icon” and “trailblazer” labels that followed them.

Now available to stream on Amazon Prime, the introspective new film takes a deep dive into the sitcom power couple’s illustrious personal and creative partnership, looking at how they met, fell in love and built a TV empire that kindled an enduring legacy, as well as the turmoil that plagued it.

The documentary boasts a trove of home movies, audio recordings and photographs — much of it provided by Lucie Arnaz — and contains interviews with her as well as entertainment industry greats like Carol Burnett, Bette Midler and Norman Lear. It arrives less than three months after the release of Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos,” which earned Oscar nominations for stars Nicole Kidman and Javier Barden.

In an interview with The Times, Poehler and Arnaz discuss the importance of revisiting the story of television’s golden couple now, the lessons of their enduring love story and how the documentary goes deeper than “Being the Ricardos.”

When I think of “I Love Lucy,” I think of being in my family’s living room with my grandma, who only spoke Spanish, and I just remember her belly laughs — it didn’t matter that she didn’t know what they were saying most of the time. Amy, what memory comes to mind when you think of “I Love Lucy”?

Poehler: I always say that “I Love Lucy” felt like it came with your TV. Like, it was always on the TV. I think this is what is so interesting about great art. Because it connects really with the idea of, frankly, a family in general, which is great TV, great art, you keep revisiting it, and you change the way you feel about it or how you see it or how it affects you. And so my hope is that I continue to have a relationship with that show in different ways. You know, just in the same way you can picture watching it with your grandmother. There will probably be a day where you’ll be watching with your grandchildren.

Many people will come to this documentary after they’ve seen “Being the Ricardos.” Amy, did you have a sense of the ground Aaron was covering? And did it influence or shape any decisions you made with the documentary?

Poehler: No, not really.

Arnaz: Most of the time we were working on the documentary, the script was unfinished, and when they started filming, we didn’t connect those dots.

The documentary is really a much deeper dive. Aaron Sorkin decided to take a slice of life. He took one week, and he kind of crammed a lot of stuff into it. But he didn’t really explore the reasons why things happen. He showed us some stuff that happened and he made it very dramatic. And it was wonderful to watch. It was a brilliant, wonderful movie. But Amy tried to answer some more questions.

Why do you think it’s so important for us to revisit their story now?

Poehler: Lucy and Desi were two outsiders — a woman and a Cuban-American running a room in the 1950s when all the gatekeepers looked the same. And here were two skilled people who felt like they really deserved the success because they had worked really hard for it and had already been married 10 years before America really, really met them in that way as a couple. And that’s really, really exciting to me. And certainly, they were a product of their times as people in the ’50s and ’60s were, but Lucy and Desi had a long career and long life with each other as married partners and as friends and co-workers, but then also in the business. Whether or not they were consciously trying to break down barriers and open doors, they certainly did. People like your grandmother heard on American TV somebody speaking Spanish, and that meant something to her. All those things, I think makes it feel very, very of the moment, for sure.

Arnaz: What came to mind immediately was that when you finish watching this — I don’t know if this was the intention when they all set upon doing it, but it was the result — there’s so much love in this film. Oh my God, you can’t not be totally moved. People I’ve shown it to, they can’t speak for a few minutes afterwards. It’s very moving. And there’s so much love, which is incredible, because there was incredible sadness — not everything turned out like a happy ending. It wasn’t a “once upon a time.”

As a woman in the creative industry, what about Lucy’s story, or even Desi’s story, resonates with you?

Poehler: I related to what it felt like to be a working mother. I related to what it felt like slowly figuring out how to run your own production company as an actor. There are so many women who have these incredible specific stories and, frankly, I was also very interested in showing people that there was life after “I Love Lucy.” In general, women in their 50s, of which I am one, are often at a really incredible, rich and productive time in their lives. And I think that it’s very, very interesting to stay with Lucy and Desi’s story during that time because there’s so much more ahead, there’s so much more to talk about. And, I mean, I love them. I hope that when you watch the film, you feel like you’re spending time with them. I truly have such high respect for how hard it was, the big swings they took, and they respected each other until the end.

Lucie, what do you think your parents would think of the recent projects that have put them back in the spotlight?

Arnaz: It’s always hard to speak for other people. I can only guess. I can only go by the kind of people that they were. And I think they were incredibly grateful people; they were always grateful for their fans, and the recognition that they were given for the work that they did. And kind of awestruck by how long that popularity lasted, even up into the ’80s.

So I’m sure that if they’re watching, I kind of tend to think they are just blown away that 70 years later, there is really almost a larger appreciation than there even was then. It’s different. It’s deeper now. It’s really not surface, put-you-on-a-pedestal, love-you kind of love. It’s: I love you with your warts and all kind of love. So that’s a lot like “I Love Lucy.”

And I think that would make them very happy — that they were remembered for the good, the bad, the ugly, for everything they did that was phenomenal, and some of the mistakes that you could say they made personally, or professionally, and still adored, and still respected after all these years.