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| Marion Ross and Tom Bosley on Happy Days. |
Remember when Steve Carell left The Office and just about everyone said the show should've ended right there? But it continued for two more seasons without him, and I was weirdly glad that it did. Carell's character, blundering paper company manager Michael Scott, was obviously the heart of the show—the catalyst for most of the stories and the reason most people were tuning in. Doing The Office without him made as much sense as doing Gilligan's Island without Gilligan or Cheers without Sam Malone.
Generally, when the main character departs a series, that series is over. But those last two Carell-less seasons of The Office gave viewers the rare opportunity to see what would happen to the other characters if Michael Scott were removed from the equation. I called it the "God is dead" era of the show. We're so used to TV shows and movies coming to tidy conclusions, but what if the cameras stayed on a little while longer? What else might we see?
You probably know where I'm going with this. The last two seasons of Happy Days bear some resemblance to the last two seasons of The Office. By 1982, several major characters had departed Happy Days, including the series' original lead, Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard). In Richie's absence, crowd-pleasing Fonzie (Henry Winkler) had been promoted to top banana, but this necessitated making him a more mature, rounded character bearing little resemblance to the womanizing daredevil he'd once been. And what about Howard and Marion Cunningham (Tom Bosley and Marion Ross)? They'd been an essential element of the show since day one, but they were in danger of becoming obsolete by Season 10 after their children had grown up and moved out of the house.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we're reviewing "Empty Nest," an episode in which Howard and Marion struggle to redefine themselves in the absence of their children. For some reason, it involves inflatable furniture. Join us for what should be a fun podcast!