Podcast Tuesday: "Still the Beaver" or "The Myth of Sissy Foods"

The unsold 1983 pilot Herndon centers around a goofy tech genius.

You might assume that, when Garry Marshall started directing feature films in 1982, he'd let his TV career quietly die out. Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley would slowly but surely run out the clock, and Garry would concentrate on movies. And, for the most part, that's pretty much what happened. From the mid-1980s onward, Garry was a known as a movie guy, not a TV guy.

But he did make a few last attempts at getting another sitcom going in the 1980s. One of his most intriguing misfires is Herndon (1983), in which future Seinfeld star Michael Richards plays a clumsy tech genius named Dr. Herndon P. Poole and a mustachioed Ted McGinley plays a down-on-his-luck wheeler dealer type named Shack who finds much-needed employment at Herndon's Silicon Valley startup. Garry directed a half-hour pilot written by Happy Days veterans Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, but ABC didn't take the bait. The network aired the pilot just once, then forgot about the project. Garry and everyone else involved moved on to other things.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we take a good, long look at that unsold pilot and talk about whether or not Herndon should have become the first major sitcom to take place in the tech industry. We'd be tickled pink if you'd join us.