100 Favorite Shows: #80 — Happy Days
“It feels so right; you can’t be wrong. Rockin’ and rollin’ all week long.”
The pilot for Happy Days initially aired under the title of “Love and the Television Set” on ABC’s anthology series, Love, American Style. Created by Garry Marshall, the show, a nostalgic look back on the “happy days” of the 1950s (happy for a group of white kids and their families in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin), was deemed a non-starter. That is, until George Lucas’ American Graffiti cast Ron Howard in the leading role and ABC’s interest in Marshall’s Happy Days was renewed. Two years after the pilot aired, Happy Days launched as a series in January 1974 with Howard again portraying the lead, Richie Cunningham. Initially revolving around Richie, his best friend, Potsie (Anson Williams), and his family, Happy Days eventually evolved to a broader vehicle for the popular Fonzie (Henry Winkler) character, who starred for all eleven seasons and 255 episodes. Howard, in one of the series’ many cast changes, departed after the seventh, but returned for the series finale, “Passages,” which aired in May 1984. It brought an end to a series that was once an antidote to a changing world. In all the best ways and all the worst ways.
In the early days of Happy Days, the theme song would run a whopping 95 seconds! (Good luck getting anything longer from a series not on HBO or Netflix these days.) It would run through the cast, superimposed into a jukebox aesthetic and then devote the rest of the crooning from Pratt & McClain to a series of clips signaling the silly sitcom that was promised to unfold. Ralph Malph (Don Most) makes out with himself at the corner of the diner, ketchup is squirted all over an innocent patron, a cheeseburger is shoved into Ralph’s tuba. These are all the wacky, family-friendly antics of the most iconic Milwaukee friend group ever.
These moments of hokiness were present throughout Happy Days. Both in the corny, canned laughter-marked dialogue (“Richie, would you like to get the paper?” his father, Howard (Tom Bosley), asks. “No thanks, I’ll read it later,” Richie retorts to Howard, who throws his hands up in mawkish exasperation. “For me!” he exclaims. The crowd goes wild) and in the long-standing iconography intertwined with the fabric of Happy Days.
From using “Chuck went upstairs” as a way to explain random disappearances of television characters through the comparison to former Cunningham child, Chuck (Gavin O’Herlihy and Randolph Roberts), to using “jump the shark” as a signal for when a show has completely abandoned its original premise (based on Fonzie water skiing over a shark in a series that had already featured Mork (Robin Williams), an alien from outer space), Happy Days helped craft a cultural vocabulary. A leather jacket, a malfunctioning jukebox, two of the greatest parents in sitcom history (Howard and Marion (Marion Ross), a motorcycle, the catchphrase, “Sit on it!” Few shows are as iconic as Happy Days and for all its innocuous innocence, it delivered a massive vernacular of tropes to apply throughout television history.
Similarly throughout television history (and the history of storytelling, as a whole), these sorts of nostalgia pieces have always existed and will persist into the future, as well. The aforementioned American Graffiti compounded the 1970s fascination with reliving the 1950s, That ’70s Show eventually turned the dial ahead on this nostalgia two decades later, Stranger Things holds the torch for our current obsession with the culture of the 1980s. We will always have these reflective look backs (put on screen for those who weren’t alive during the ’50s and only have tinted photographs (like the one Chuck and Howard take together with a basketball on Christmas) to illustrate their perceptions); your mileage just tends to fluctuate based on which decade is most fascinating to you.
As someone who loves the “simpler times” of Happy Days (if you were white and middle class, of course), the 1950s, and the aesthetic of Johnny Rockets, I was delighted at each sight of a milkshake and each interstitial play of “Bye Bye Love,” cementing Happy Days as a legacy series in the annals of TV lore. However, what sets Happy Days apart from, say, That ’70s Show or even another Garry Marshall endeavor, is that the nostalgia has manifested differently over time. Now, Happy Days is hardly a nostalgia machine for the 1950s, but for the 1970s and those who grew up watching the adventures of Richie, Fonzie, and the gang. It’s made all the better by seeing how deep the love still is in the friendship of Howard and Winkler, among others.
Returning to that doo-wop, though, the musical sensibility of Happy Days thrust me directly back into the mindset I once had when discovering groups like Dion and the Belmonts, The Everly Brothers, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and more on Pandora. Something about the doo-wop genre (perhaps its proclivity for the minor key or unabashedly sweet lyrics) feels nostalgic from the moment exists. It’s hard not to feel pangs of swooning, sweet melancholy when Potsie silkily carols “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” in the beginning of season three’s “They Call It Potsie Love.”
The intent of the scene is to show Potsie serenading Joanie (Erin Moran) and plunging her directly into a crush of young love. But let’s be honest, who wouldn’t end up having a dream about marrying Potsie if he sung so beautifully directly to us and affectionately played with our hair? Always down to have his ego boosted, Potsie directly leans into the “secret admirer” he receives after Joanie begins to plot a way to ask him out, but is forced to quickly pivot when it’s revealed that this distant adorer is actually the kid sister of his best pal.
The wholesomeness in Happy Days returned at the culmination of this episode, though, as Potsie quickly apologizes for dismissing Joanie as a romantic nonentity for him. While this may be true, he knows how deep young love can hurt and he goes to great lengths to put Joanie down gently, defending her feelings and hiding her from the embarrassment of Ralph and Richie finding her alone with him in Arnold’s.
It’s a sweet moment in an otherwise largely comedic, somewhat lovey dovey episode of Happy Days, which wound up marking the series’ par over time. But it’s punctuated in how Richie interacts with Joanie after he secretly observes that she’s hiding in Arnold’s (Ralph is, of course, oblivious). Joanie believes he’s about to make fun of her when he realizes she’s under one of the tables (and, to be honest, I expected this, too, even though I know how kind Richie is and have seen this episode before). Instead, he wraps her in a coat and an arm around her rejected shoulder. Maybe my brain has just been poisoned by caustic characters and plenty of kids’ shows that depicted fraught relationships between siblings. Happy Days never cared to show anything but the best in people, especially when it counted.
What’s also notable about “They Call It Potsie Love” is that Fonzie is hardly in the episode at all (save for a knowing acknowledgement of Joanie, as he always relished his position as a role model for characters like her and his cousin, Chachi (Scott Baio)). Initially, Fonzie was just another recurring character in Happy Days, depicted as an effortlessly cool greaser who came from a rough upbringing (his characterization is like if Sesame Street adapted The Outsiders. Or, more accurately, if Garry Marshall adapted it). Over time, though, Happy Days was retooled to become broader, cornier, more accessible. As such, it became a series that prominently revolved around Fonzie as the main character or the 1B to Richie’s 1A, at the very least.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing either. After all, Fonzie is considered one of television’s greatest creations of all-time for a reason. His exterior depictions of toughness occasionally rub against his internalized sensitivity (like in “Fonsillectomy” when dental surgery proves daunting for The Fonz), but he never wavers from embracing the kind of person he believes is the best kind to be in the world. Fonzie always defends others who struggle to defend themselves, leans occasionally into the same sort of progressivism Winkler is known for (with a proclivity for Caps Lock), and consistently levies respect to his companions and mentors — so long as they deserve it. His affection for the Cunningham parents (always calling Marion “Mrs. C,” as she calls him “Arthur” (for Arthur Fonzarelli) contributes to his profound love for Richie. While Ralph and Potsie were lovable nerds in Fonzie’s eyes, Richie was the only one who’d occasionally showcase spinal stiffness and the ability to stand up to Fonzie when their typically-aligned beliefs would clash. Over time, Richie was unquestionably Fonzie’s best friend and they admired each other in a complementary fashion (and it was always heartwarmingly depicted).
What’s also notable about the Fonzie character is that he seems genuinely in possession of magical powers. (Theoretically, a punch to a jukebox might work, but sometimes Fonzie just snaps his way out of trouble, which makes me think he’d be screaming, “More weight!” if the nostalgia was geared more towards 1690s Salem, as opposed to 1950s Milwaukee.) Since Happy Days is an innocuous look back at youth — a memory of the glory days of childhood and early adulthood as being more perfect than they actually were — it’s possible that the memory of Fonzie simply managed to usurp his original behavior. Just like the old adage of fishermen expanding their measurement details every time their aquatic stories are retold.
For all the magic he has, though, Fonzie’s fantastical abilities fail him when his day in “The Motorcycle” begins with the revelation that his motorcycle was totaled and spread around the Cunningham yard in a manner similar to the final scene of Tower Heist. The culprit is eventually revealed to be Ralph Malph, who was terrified into buying Fonzie a new bike to avoid being murdered by him and initially tried to “hide” his inadvertently destructive actions (like placing a mirror in a mailbox, as if that would make the problem go away). Thanks to Richie, who knows that for all of Fonzie’s respect and care for others, he does not respond coolly to accidents (like when Chachi burns Arnold’s down), Ralph’s confession comes with Fonzie tied to a chair.
Granted, he still tries to strangle Ralph, but his magic is ineffectual against a broken motorcycle and against ropes affixing him to a chair in the Cunningham home. In the span of the twenty-five minutes, all is resolved between Fonzie and Ralph (cliffhangers and serialization were not the aim of Happy Days), thanks to the new bike (Ralph accidentally tells Fonzie to “sit on it” when suggesting he try out the feel of the motorcycle), which Fonzie revs in the home and potentially poisons the Cunninghams with carbon monoxide.
But the episode is mostly noteworthy, not for the make-up between Fonzie and Ralph Malph, but for the revelation of what the motorcycle actually means to Fonzie. It’s something that made him cool, even when nothing else could. It’s astonishing enough to even think of the idea that, at one point, Fonzie wasn’t cool. How could it be possible? The fact that it was must’ve given hope to an entire generation of dorks and nerds who just wanted to make others swoon with the click of a finger and the shrug of a hairstyle.
The common thread between Joanie’s crush on Potsie and Fonzie’s forgiveness of Ralph, though has nothing to do with any of those four characters and everything to do with Richie. He’s observant and he recognizes the clues that suggest Joanie was Potsie’s secret admirer and the obvious nervousness cascading down Ralph’s lying forehead. Noticing when his friends are faced with high emotions and uncertainty, Richie matches this quality against the care he has for each of them. He’s the one who’s there for his friends and no episode illustrates this quality better than “Guess Who’s Coming to Christmas,” Happy Days’ famed holiday installment.
From the first seconds of the episode, the stakes are laid out clearly. It may be a sitcom about a friend group, but this particular episode of Happy Days, as delineated by Howard, will see no friends in the Cunningham household; it’s a holiday for family, he insists. Likewise, when Fonzie turns up at Arnold’s with gifts in tow, he leans into the exuberant compliments applied to him by his friends and the staff members who remark about Fonzie’s overflowing Christmas spirit and the heart of generosity he nurtures “underneath that leather.”
After spreading yuletide cheer to the niche group in Milwaukee, Fonzie covers for himself when his friends ask what his Christmas plans entail. He weaves a tale of a big house in Waukesha with lights aplenty and family galore, but when the Cunninghams experience a mechanical problem with their car and Fonzie offers to fix it (thus, “missing his bus” to Waukesha), the unfeeling veneer falls away as Richie secretly observes Fonzie cooking ravioli alone in the shop, rather than rescheduling his bus trip west.
Obviously, Richie instantly makes the connection and understands that Fonzie is spending Christmas alone and would sooner make up a lie about his holiday than feel as if others are pitying him. (The lengths he goes to maintain the farce are heartbreaking, as he even carries an empty suitcase when Richie and Howard ambush him at his home.) But it’s still Richie who pushes Howard to break his rule of a family-only Christmas to include The Fonz instead.
The Cunninghams are solemn to hear of Fonzie spending Christmas alone and, through the combination of Howard’s story about a mechanical Santa decoration that needs fixing and Richie’s suggestion that Fonzie comes only to see their tree (never claiming that the Waukesha story is an obvious lie), he’s eventually convinced. It becomes Fonzie’s duty to read “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” (“Can you dig it?”) and to say grace at Christmas dinner (“Hey, God? Thanks”), showing how readily willing he was to forego his reluctance and embrace a warm, mirthful family Christmas. “That’s for having all your freckles in the right place,” Fonzie says to Richie while they toast popcorn over the fire, pounding him on the shoulder and never breaking eye contact. Of course, it was Richie.
And, of course, it was the Cunninghams. Howard’s desire to have a family-only Christmas is a perfectly reasonable one, but making sure that Fonzie (a friend of his son’s and an occasional inconvenience of his, mind you) isn’t alone for a holiday that can be as depressing as it is joyous takes priority. It’s an important lesson to learn and one that speaks to the true spirit of Christmas; it’s a spirit that I’ve noticed present in my own family and my own upbringing. When one friend of mine remarked that he had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving, my parents didn’t hesitate to offer him a ride to my aunt’s home for the holiday. He later admitted he was joking (and documented his own Thanksgiving with photographic proof to assuage my concerns), but knowing how my mother and father reacted to him and knowing the entirety of “Guess Who’s Coming to Christmas,” I appreciated Happy Days to a new extent.
It’s a show I had no choice but to come to late (it was off the air a decade and a half before my birth), but it’s a show they both grew up enjoying and, obviously, learning from. Maybe the Cunninghams were representative of a dream that never existed and maybe the realism of Happy Days was sacrificed after forty or so episodes. But in that Christmas episode, the one that extended a home for Fonzie, the coolest character who ever lived (this side of Cliff Booth), the Cunninghams showed that a family could be kind — even in the face of a lost tradition. It’s something my parents learned from their own families, but also from Happy Days. And it’s something I learned from them. It may not be the most profound television sentiment, but it’s one that proves how special Happy Days could be at its peak. So: Hey, Garry Marshall? Thanks.
