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| Scott Baio and Henry Winkler on Happy Days. |
Happy Days is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month. Believe it or not, it's been half a century since the first episode of Season 1, "All the Way," originally aired on January 15, 1974. Wait, don't most sitcoms debut in September or so? Well, yes. Let me explain.
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| The first(ish) episode of Happy Days. |
Garry Marshall's nostalgic sitcom debuted in January because ABC initially had so little faith in it. Like The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, and All in the Family, Happy Days was a midseason replacement that defied expectations and became a long-running hit. In fact, one of the cast members of All in the Family, Rob Reiner, cowrote "All the Way." That may seem like a random pairing to us (Meathead and Fonzie?), but remember that Rob's father, Carl, was Garry Marshall's mentor and friend and that Rob was married to Garry's sister, Penny, from 1971 to 1981.
Now, a total nerd might claim that Happy Days had its true 50th birthday two years ago, because the earliest pilot for the series ("Love and the Happy Days") aired as an episode of the ABC anthology series Love, American Style on February 25, 1972. The network passed on that pilot, only changing its mind when the movie American Graffiti (1973) and the stage musical Grease became successful. The Happy Days series that ran from 1974 to 1984 was heavily influenced by both Graffiti and Grease and bore only a passing resemblance to the 1972 pilot. That's why I'm fine with calling January 15, 1974 the birthday of Happy Days.
So we know when the show began. But when, exactly, did Happy Days end? That's much trickier to pin down. The eleventh and final season of the show was a total mess in terms of scheduling, bouncing around from night to night and even vanishing from the schedule for weeks. I consulted the invaluable book The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh to make sense of it all.
Happy Days aired (to great success) on Tuesday nights at 8:00 from January 1974 until September 1983, when the veteran series was rudely transplanted to 8:30 to make room for a new sitcom, Just Our Luck. When that show failed miserably, the coveted 8:00 berth went to another freshman series, Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders. Happy Days stayed in the 8:30 slot until January 1984, when it was booted from the schedule altogether so that ABC could cover the Winter Olympics. Even when the Olympics were over, however, Happy Days remained on hiatus. Its old time slot went to yet another new show, Norman Lear's A.K.A. Pablo starring Paul Rodriguez.
Happy Days finally returned to Tuesday nights on ABC from April to May 1984 for a brief run of episodes that included the two-part series finale, "Passages." But ABC had a handful of unaired episodes left over from the hiatus. These ultimately aired on Thursday nights at 8:00 from June to July 1984. According to The Complete Directory, that's where the Happy Days story ends.
Looking back through old newspapers from 1984, I have concluded that the original run of Happy Days finally came to a halt on July 19, 1984 with the episode "Good News, Bad News" in which Chachi (Scott Baio) discovers he has diabetes. And, in case you haven't guessed by now, that's the very episode we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. Is this episode worthy of being the true finale of Happy Days? You know how to find out! (In case you don't, it's by clicking the play button below.)