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| Michael Leon and Henry Winkler on Happy Days. |
Viewers may not realize that TV networks occasionally air episodes of their favorite shows out of order. Producers, even very successful ones like Garry Marshall, have little to no control over this. If a network executive wants to switch the order around, maybe because he thinks a certain episode will perform better during a particular week, he'll do it. Continuity be damned.
For the most part, this isn't a problem for a series like Happy Days, where the episodes are generally self-contained and serialization is minimal. But things got out of hand during the show's final season in 1983-84. One of the major arcs of the season involved Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Roger (Ted McGinley) working at Patton, a tough vocational school populated by stereotypical hoodlums and thugs. Thanks to ABC's odd scheduling decisions, there were several brief mentions of Patton on Happy Days before any of the episodes about the school had even aired! And then, in "You Get What You Pay For," Joanie casually mentions teaching at Patton, even though she didn't start until "Kiss Me, Teach" a week later.
All this shuffling around by ABC led to two "very special episodes" about Patton being aired back-to-back: the aforementioned "Kiss Me, Teach," in which Joanie is almost sexually assaulted, and "The People vs. The Fonz," in which Fonzie is (falsely) accused of hitting a student (guest star Michael Leon). And the latter is exactly the episode we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. You can find out what we thought by listening to the podcast below: