Podcast Tuesday: "The Coach and the Roach"

Ted McGinley and Ken Osmond on Happy Days.

During its final season, Happy Days was getting trounced in the ratings just about every week.  The main problem was that the veteran sitcom was scheduled opposite NBC's The A-Team, which was siphoning off millions of young viewers. Making matters worse, though, was the fact that Happy Days followed the phenomenally unpopular Just Our Luck, a gimmicky sitcom about a wisecracking genie named Shabu (T.K. Carter) and his uninspiring master Keith (Richard Gilliland). To put it mildly, America was not interested in watching this embarrassing show. It was ratings Kryptonite.

 

These must have been gloomy times at ABC. Their once-proud Tuesday night lineup was falling apart quickly. Things got so bad that, by December 1983, the 8:00 Just Our Luck/Happy Days hour was getting beaten not only by The A-Team but even by CBS' now-forgotten legal drama The Mississippi. Yes, there was a time when Ralph Waite of The Waltons as a lawyer turned riverboat captain was a bigger draw than Fonzie (Henry Winkler). It was clear that Happy Days had overstayed its welcome.

Despite all that, the show's final, little-watched season has its share of hidden gems. In fact, overall, it's a marked improvement over the rather snoozy, underwhelming Season 10. I think the cast and crew knew Happy Days was on its last legs and decided to put a little extra effort into this final batch of stories. A good example of this is "Vocational Education," in which preppie dork Roger (Ted McGinley) becomes the principal of the rough-and-tumble George S. Patton Vocational School. This one is especially fun because of its guest stars, including Leave it to Beaver's Ken Osmond as a sleazy shop teacher and Back to the Future (1985) star Crispin Glover as a juvenile delinquent named Roach.

We have a lot to say about "Vocational Education," and you can hear all of it in the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast.

Podcast Tuesday: "The @#$% Plane Has Crashed Into the Mountain!"

Ted McGinley and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.

During its seventh season, the normally-edgeless Happy Days did a couple of mildly risqué episodes ("Burlesque," "Joanie Busts Out") to compete with NBC's relatively racy The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, starring Claude Akins as a bumbling Southern lawman. Ultimately, the innuendo-laden Lobo was vanquished by Happy Days, but Akins and company had given the long-running ABC sitcom its strongest competition since Good Times back in Season 2. Happy Days soon returned to its inoffensive normal self, but not before being scolded by television critics for (briefly) becoming too smutty.

Happy Days faced an even more serious threat in Season 10 when NBC moved its rip-roaring new series The A-Team to Tuesday nights. How would ABC respond to this fierce rival? Would Happy Days start doing more action-packed stories to lure back former viewers? This may seem like a far-fetched idea, but don't forget that Happy Days had already done a number of stories with stunts and action scenes, including "Fearless Fonzarelli" (Season 3), "Fonzie Loves Pinky" (Season 4), "Hollywood" (Season 5), and most especially "Westward, Ho!" (Season 6), which featured a bull-riding competition and an out-of-control wagon.

The TV landscape was a-changin' by 1983, and action shows were in vogue. While Happy Days was getting outpaced by The A-Team on Tuesday nights, its spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi was getting clobbered by Magnum P.I. on Thursday nights. I don't know if this was purely a coincidence, but Happy Days aired one of its more action-heavy episodes, "Wild Blue Yonder," shortly after The A-Team moved to Tuesdays. The plot of this one has Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Roger (Ted McGinley) boarding a small plane that crashes in the mountains, leaving them stranded in a snowy wasteland. By Happy Days standards, this is pretty high octane stuff.

But does that make for a good episode? You know how to find out -- listen to the latest installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. 

Podcast Tuesday: "Full Metal Fonzie"

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...