Post by Captain Snark on Mar 31, 2015 20:17:25 GMT -5
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Remember the scene in Bull Durham where baseball veteran Kevin Costner sat newcomer Tim Robbins down and explained to him all the cliches to tell interviewers? (Like "I just want to be good for my team" and "I'm taking it one day at a time.") Well, I have a feeling that when Garry Marshall was starting out in the sitcom business some old-timer explained all the cliches to him too. Marshall's become a movie director, but he's never forgotten a single cliche! And the late '70s-early '80s sitcom he produced, set in Milwaukee in the 1950s, doesn't miss any either.
I figure every decade has its definitive cheesy blockbuster sitcom. There's been I Love Lucy in the '50s, The Beverly Hillbillies in the '60s, The Cosby Show in the '80s, Friends in the '90s, Two and a Half Men in the thousands, or whatever you call the 2000-2010 decade. And Happy Days was clearly the definitive cheesy blockbuster sitcom of the '70s. It had an oddly superficial idea of '50s atmosphere: you put classic rock & roll on the soundtrack and insert references to '50s TV shows in the script. It was the '50s without the complications, or in a broader sense, the '70s without the complications. And the teenagers, as with Welcome Back, Kotter and Grease, were played by actors all too obviously on the wrong side of twenty. (One improvement John Hughes made to teenage comedies was to cast actors who really seemed still adolescent.)
Happy Days wasn't as relentlessly unfunny as its ineffable spinoff Laverne & Shirley, but it was oddly unimaginative. You could always tell when the season was almost over because the writers' ideas would be stretched near the breaking point and they's start doing dubious stuff like musical numbers. You could also tell when a gag worked particularly well because they'd repeat it again and again in later episodes.
In the first couple of seasons, before Fonzie became the show's real star, there was one episode after another where Richie faces a moral dilemma: Will he let the quiz show host feed him the answers? Will he reveal to his POed friends that the big rock band is hiding at his house? Will he keep his ROTC squad on report? Will he sell the photo of Clarabelle the Clown without his makeup? But he always ends up Doing the Right Thing. Who cares? Take the money and run, Richie!
One particularly tasteless episode has Howard setting up his reluctant son on a blind date with the daughter of a businessman he wants to curry favour with. Fonzie suggests to Richie that he send Potsie in his place and nobody will be the wiser. Of course there's a complication: Potsie gets horny and ends up tearing the girl's dress, getting Richie into hot water. Attempted date rape, how funny! Shall we double the bad taste? Potsie confesses "I tore her dress," and Howard looks at Richie and Potsie and respectively says to them, "You held her and you tore her dress?" What's funnier than date rape? Gang rape, of course! (I'll admit that made me laugh when I was a kid.)
Of course, the phrase "jump the shark" comes from the beginning of the fifth season when Fonzie water ski jumps over a shark pool on a dare. If the show went south just then, maybe the real reason was the addition of Scott Baio's Cousin Chachi with his anachronistically long hair. (And I never understood the appeal of Al Molinaro's Alfred.) In earlier seasons, the opening credits had shown Henry Winkler giving a thumb up; now they showed him giving two thumbs up. Way to not improve a show! But some people will say that the show's true shark-jumping came later, perhaps at the start of the eighth season when Richie left the show. Yet I can understand Ron Howard wanting to leave: watching him play a teenager came to be more and more painful.
Afterward, the show lingered on for four whole seasons before retiring to the big syndicator in the sky. And as I said, Marshall went on to direct movies. Yet at heart he's still making cheesy sitcoms: if you doubt me, try to sit through Pretty Woman or The Princess Diaries. Most things change, but he never will!
Remember the scene in Bull Durham where baseball veteran Kevin Costner sat newcomer Tim Robbins down and explained to him all the cliches to tell interviewers? (Like "I just want to be good for my team" and "I'm taking it one day at a time.") Well, I have a feeling that when Garry Marshall was starting out in the sitcom business some old-timer explained all the cliches to him too. Marshall's become a movie director, but he's never forgotten a single cliche! And the late '70s-early '80s sitcom he produced, set in Milwaukee in the 1950s, doesn't miss any either.I figure every decade has its definitive cheesy blockbuster sitcom. There's been I Love Lucy in the '50s, The Beverly Hillbillies in the '60s, The Cosby Show in the '80s, Friends in the '90s, Two and a Half Men in the thousands, or whatever you call the 2000-2010 decade. And Happy Days was clearly the definitive cheesy blockbuster sitcom of the '70s. It had an oddly superficial idea of '50s atmosphere: you put classic rock & roll on the soundtrack and insert references to '50s TV shows in the script. It was the '50s without the complications, or in a broader sense, the '70s without the complications. And the teenagers, as with Welcome Back, Kotter and Grease, were played by actors all too obviously on the wrong side of twenty. (One improvement John Hughes made to teenage comedies was to cast actors who really seemed still adolescent.)
Happy Days wasn't as relentlessly unfunny as its ineffable spinoff Laverne & Shirley, but it was oddly unimaginative. You could always tell when the season was almost over because the writers' ideas would be stretched near the breaking point and they's start doing dubious stuff like musical numbers. You could also tell when a gag worked particularly well because they'd repeat it again and again in later episodes.
In the first couple of seasons, before Fonzie became the show's real star, there was one episode after another where Richie faces a moral dilemma: Will he let the quiz show host feed him the answers? Will he reveal to his POed friends that the big rock band is hiding at his house? Will he keep his ROTC squad on report? Will he sell the photo of Clarabelle the Clown without his makeup? But he always ends up Doing the Right Thing. Who cares? Take the money and run, Richie!
One particularly tasteless episode has Howard setting up his reluctant son on a blind date with the daughter of a businessman he wants to curry favour with. Fonzie suggests to Richie that he send Potsie in his place and nobody will be the wiser. Of course there's a complication: Potsie gets horny and ends up tearing the girl's dress, getting Richie into hot water. Attempted date rape, how funny! Shall we double the bad taste? Potsie confesses "I tore her dress," and Howard looks at Richie and Potsie and respectively says to them, "You held her and you tore her dress?" What's funnier than date rape? Gang rape, of course! (I'll admit that made me laugh when I was a kid.)
Of course, the phrase "jump the shark" comes from the beginning of the fifth season when Fonzie water ski jumps over a shark pool on a dare. If the show went south just then, maybe the real reason was the addition of Scott Baio's Cousin Chachi with his anachronistically long hair. (And I never understood the appeal of Al Molinaro's Alfred.) In earlier seasons, the opening credits had shown Henry Winkler giving a thumb up; now they showed him giving two thumbs up. Way to not improve a show! But some people will say that the show's true shark-jumping came later, perhaps at the start of the eighth season when Richie left the show. Yet I can understand Ron Howard wanting to leave: watching him play a teenager came to be more and more painful.
Afterward, the show lingered on for four whole seasons before retiring to the big syndicator in the sky. And as I said, Marshall went on to direct movies. Yet at heart he's still making cheesy sitcoms: if you doubt me, try to sit through Pretty Woman or The Princess Diaries. Most things change, but he never will!