Podcast Tuesday: "Legend of the Black Widow"

Joanna Lee lines up a shot in The Other Sister.

When asked about his favorite episodes of Happy Days, producer Garry Marshall mentioned the show's so-called "very special episodes" that dealt with more serious situations. When Garry was a young writer on such lighthearted sitcoms as The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Lucy Show in the 1960s, these topics might have been off-limits to him. But TV changed drastically in the 1970s, especially because of the popularity of Norman Lear's controversial sitcoms like All in the Family, Maude, and Good Times. Those shows were not afraid of tackling uncomfortable topics, and they got good ratings. So the major networks decided to discuss such previously-taboo subjects as disease and mental illness in their prime time comedies. Garry took full advantage, as he explained in a career-spanning archival interview:

With Happy Days, we could do all the pressure group stuff that we couldn't do in some of the other situations, that were not done in the Van Dyke/Lucy days. So it became, you know, philosophically, while you have the audience's attention, you might as well say something. So then we did all our series of pressure groups in a good sense. We did our diabetes show, we did our mentally challenged show, our hard-of-hearing show, whatever that was, the blind challenge. I don't know the politically correct things, but we did all the shows that pointed out to the audience that you could overcome a handicap. You could do all these things.

Did that philosophy carry over into Garry's movies? To an extent, sure. His characters dealt with serious, life-threatening illnesses in Nothing in Common (1986) and Beaches (1988). There was at least one terminally-ill child in Dear God (1996). That film was mostly a feel-good comedy, but it had a preachy side, too, with its message about helping the poor, lonely, and depressed even when you're poor, lonely, and depressed yourself.

However, with his 1999 romantic comedy The Other Sister, Garry really went for it. It's a "very special episode" in movie form, complete with a message about overcoming a handicap. Yet again, he lined up a very impressive cast, including Juliette Lewis, Giovanni Ribisi, Diane Keaton, and Tom Skerritt. This was obviously a project very close to Garry's heart, since he cowrote the screenplay himself with Happy Days scribe Bob Brunner. 

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about that film and our reaction to it. We'd love for you to join us.