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| Henry Winkler and Ed Peck on Happy Days. |
Every fan of Westerns knows that a gunfighter's luck can only hold out for so long. As quick as he might be on the draw, he'll eventually get sloppy, careless, or overconfident. His reflexes will slow down with age, and then it's only a matter of time before he's gunned down by some up-and-coming hotshot. In the Coen brothers' Western pastiche The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), the sharp-shooting Buster (Tim Blake Nelson) strides into a showdown wearing a big Cheshire cat grin on his face and boasting of his skills. Mere seconds later, though, there's a bloody bullet hole in his cowboy hat.
"Well," he says with his usual understatement, "that ain't good." He then drops dead in the street. And that's the end of Buster's brilliant career. He's been outgunned by a younger man.
For many years, Happy Days was quick on the draw, too, and gunned down many opponents. The Richard Pryor Show, Cliffhangers, The Man from Atlantis, Grandpa Goes to Washington -- they all wound up on Boot Hill thanks to Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and the gang. The critics hated 'em and the Emmys ignored 'em, but did that bother the cast and crew of Happy Days? Nah. Why should it? They were still winning their timeslot well into the 1982-83 season. But then something truly unexpected happened that changed the face of television: NBC staged the comeback of the decade.
For most of the 1970s, ABC's only real competition was perennial powerhouse CBS. Apart from the rare hit like Little House on the Prairie and Sanford and Son, NBC was in the doldrums. But things changed at the Peacock Network in the 1980s under the leadership of new president Brandon Tartikoff. In January 1983, for example, NBC debuted an action-packed new show called The A-Team featuring breakout star Mr. T from Rocky III (1982). After just a few weeks, the freshman show moved to Tuesday nights at 8:00, directly opposite Happy Days. And Mr. T specifically called out the competition in a widely-seen promo, gruffly informing Fonzie that his happy days were over.
And they were. Happy Days took another year and a half to die of old age, but The A-Team siphoned away most of the show's audience. Tartkoff had sensed that Happy Days was vulnerable, and he was right. The ABC sitcom's ratings plummeted to their lowest levels ever. ABC cut the show's budget, evicted it from its normal timeslot, and eventually dropkicked it from the schedule entirely.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we review the February 1983 episode "I'm Not At Liberty." This was the first episode to go up against The A-Team, so we can call this the beginning of the end of Happy Days. It marks another milestone, too, as Fonzie's longtime antagonist Officer Kirk (Ed Peck) appears for the last time.
What did we think of "I'm Not at Liberty"? Funny you should ask...