Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Goodbye grey skies, hello blue...




The first show I ever loved was Happy Days.

That is not entirely true. The first show I ever loved with all of my heart was Sesame Street. But Happy Days was the second and I loved it with a fierceness that still endures today. I honestly think that it is the absolute best sitcom ever in the history of time.

I say this as (at least a former lover) of television. I don't really watch much television anymore other than the news and sports, but once upon a time I loved tv so much that just threatening to take away one television hour was an easy and productive punishment in my world.

So, yes, were I to make a list of great sitcoms, it would include all the best-I Love Lucy, Cheers, Seinfeld, All In The Family, and on and on until we eventually even would get to Homeboys In Outer Space because yes, I used to watch literally every episode of television on the air.

But the top of my list is reserved for Happy Days.

I was born in 1978. Fonzie had jumped the shark by then. But I loved him. And Joanie. And Chachi. Oh, how I loved Chachi.

The Cunningham home was a place of love, where Joanie and Richie's friends were accepted no matter the situation. Potsie is constantly referred to as someone who is disliked by his own father, but he has a heart of gold most clearly seen in the episode in which Joanie develops a huge crush on him and he is forced to let her down gently. So many faces make their way through the Cunningham's house-from cousin Roger to Jenny Picalo to Flip and K.C. Silly comedy highjinks ensue, but the characters always come home to a place of acceptance. When Richie blows the final shot of his high school basketball game, Howard is there to offer him a life saver.

I wanted to live in that world, where the biker was really a sweetheart scared to have his tonsils out, where the dorky Ralph and Potsie made even square Richie look cool, and most of all where I could meet and fall in love with a boy who always wears a bandana tied around his knee.

The world that Garry Marshall created was just a happy world where funny things happened. And today everyone is talking about how he made these sitcoms that were like comfort food for a decade that had seen the end of an unpopular war, the rise of an urban environment, the birth and death of disco, the maturing of hippies who left Woodstock to raise families in the suburbs-children who would grow up just in time to become teenagers in the mall loving, Reganomics eighties, abandoning those notions that the seventies presented as truth, the idea that all we needed was to read a lot and love each other and messy things like unequal pay for women could be swept away by passage of the ERA.

And to a degree, I agree with that. Garry Marshall was a genuinely nice guy who set out to make a show of what life was like in the 1950s. And another that was full of two women doing physical comedy to rival Lucille Ball. And yet another show that introduced a comedy legend to the world in the guise of an alien.

But he also introduced characters that wouldn't have been welcome on television a decade before. The idea of a leather-clad biker being the heart of a sweet family sitcom would have been unheard of in the 1960s. Two single women sharing an apartment and having active dating lives in which they talked often about "vodiododo." In his way he changed the face of television.

So allow me to add my voice to the chorus today saying goodbye to Garry Marshall, to say thank you for all the hours of joy from not only television, but so many movies and even characters in shows that he didn't create (Stan Lansing, I am looking at you). Thank you for making my childhood a happy place. And for Chachi.

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