Podcast Tuesday: "Halfway Home for Thanksgiving"

A bewigged Tom Bosley on Happy Days.

A redesigned Homer and Marge.

By the time The Simpsons became a weekly series in 1989, it had been a recurring segment on Fox's The Tracey Ullman Show for two years. The American television-watching public was already quite familiar with the antics of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. By The Simpsons' second season, the show's writers were already confident enough to deviate from the show's formula. For instance, the scripts that year included "The Way We Was," a flashback episode set in the 1970s featuring teenage versions of Homer, Marge, and even Barney Gumble. Season 2 was also when The Simpsons did its first "Treehouse of Horror" episode, which was abnormal in two ways. Not only was it an anthology (three self-contained segments linked by a wraparound story), but it placed the characters into wild scenarios involving ghosts, haunted houses, and even aliens from outer space.

The Simpsons' second season proved that the series and its characters were mutable and adaptable. The show now had free reign to do all kinds of experiments, messing with the characters' designs and placing them into all kinds of bizarre scenarios -- historical, futuristic, or purely fantastic. You could argue that the show already had a head start because it was animated. Would viewers of a live-action sitcom forgive this kind of creative liberty from a weekly series?

The answer is, sort of, sure. Within reason. Happy Days tested its luck, stylistically speaking, with a Season 6 episode called "The First Thanksgiving," which originally aired on November 21, 1978. This holiday story largely takes place in the year 1621 and offers us Pilgrim-era counterparts of Richie, Fonzie, Ralph, Potsie, Joanie, Howard, Marion, and Al. This is arguably the second nonconventional Happy Days episode we've seen so far, with the first being Season 5's musical extravaganza "Be My Valentine."

Does this stylistic gamble pay off? Find out when my cohost and I review "The First Thanksgiving" on the newest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. Incidentally, this episode marks the rough midpoint of the entire Happy Days series. I don't know if that's a milestone or not, but I'm treating it like one.