Podcast Tuesday: "Still the Beaver" or "The Myth of Sissy Foods"

The unsold 1983 pilot Herndon centers around a goofy tech genius.

You might assume that, when Garry Marshall started directing feature films in 1982, he'd let his TV career quietly die out. Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley would slowly but surely run out the clock, and Garry would concentrate on movies. And, for the most part, that's pretty much what happened. From the mid-1980s onward, Garry was a known as a movie guy, not a TV guy.

But he did make a few last attempts at getting another sitcom going in the 1980s. One of his most intriguing misfires is Herndon (1983), in which future Seinfeld star Michael Richards plays a clumsy tech genius named Dr. Herndon P. Poole and a mustachioed Ted McGinley plays a down-on-his-luck wheeler dealer type named Shack who finds much-needed employment at Herndon's Silicon Valley startup. Garry directed a half-hour pilot written by Happy Days veterans Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, but ABC didn't take the bait. The network aired the pilot just once, then forgot about the project. Garry and everyone else involved moved on to other things.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we take a good, long look at that unsold pilot and talk about whether or not Herndon should have become the first major sitcom to take place in the tech industry. We'd be tickled pink if you'd join us.

Podcast Tuesday: "Ted McGinley and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day"

Ted McGinley and Teddi Siddal on Happy Days.

Ted McGinley gets a bad rap. Yes, he was on a number of long-running TV series when they were in their final seasons -- their death throes, if you will. In addition to his role as preppy dork Roger Phillips on Happy Days, Ted was on The Love Boat, Dynasty, and Married... With Children when those shows were on the way out. But was this handsome California actor the Grim Reaper of Prime Time? Ratings Kryptonite? A bad luck charm? No, not at all. TV shows inevitably age and decline in popularity (and profitability), causing networks to cancel them. It happens. All those shows I just mentioned would have gone off the air anyway, even if Ted McGinley had never been born.

Besides, Ted is a pretty decent comic actor when he's given the right material. I loved his work as gold digger Jefferson D'arcy on Married... With Children, for instance, and he's even pretty decent on Happy Days. He had the unenviable task of filling in for the departing Ron Howard, but he handles it with aplomb. In a way, his very presence on the show is a tribute to Ron's importance. The producers realized that there needed to be someone "square" to serve as a foil to the ultra-cool Fonzie (Henry Winkler). Enter McGinley.

This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, we talk about "Hello, Roger," the Season 8 episode that introduced the world to Ted McGinley and Roger Phillips. We hope you'll join us.