We know they don’t make shows like Happy Days, Mork & Mindy or Laverne & Shirley any more.
What we don’t learn from a new loving tribute to their late creator, Garry Marshall, is why not.
Okay, The Happy Days of Garry Marshall, which airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, doesn’t have to address that question.
But after a quick romp through some of the many great moments from Marshall’s shows, a lot of viewers may find themselves asking.
Marshall, who went to direct movies like Pretty Woman, comes off here like the Steven Spielberg of television. He wanted to tell stories that viewers could get lost in and ended up making them feel good.
It’s not that television today doesn’t have great shows. It’s got a lot of them. It just doesn’t have many that capture the same kind of fun as Marshall shows.
“I believed in romance, happy endings, and people falling in love,” Marshall said of his career.
It’s clear from the clips here that Marshall also understood something too many sitcoms in recent years have forgotten.
It’s not enough to pepper the viewer with jokes, even decent jokes, for half an hour. To get viewers invested in a show, they have to care about the characters. That was true for I Love Lucy, that was true for M*A*S*H, that was true for Friends, and that was true for The Big Bang Theory.
Just as it was true for Garry Marshall’s best shows.
The Happy Days of Garry Marshall has a bonus as well: a cavalcade of alumni from his productions. We hear from Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Henry Winkler, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, and a dozen others, all praising Marshall for his skills and visions alongside thanking him for his friendship.
This special includes both a brief biographical roundup and a running motif of praise for his wife, Barbara, who is basically described as the responsible grownup who enabled Marshall to indulge his inner child.
Marshall was writing jokes almost from the moment he could write, and by the time he got to Northwestern, he was in show biz, helping produce the school’s annual talent show.
He moved to Hollywood in 1961 and landed his dream job writing for The Dick Van Dyke Show. He went out on his own by selling Happy Days, though the series didn’t launch until three years after the pilot ran as an episode of Love American Style.
Once Happy Days became a hit, so did Marshall, and his combination of skill and personality made him a go-to guy for the biz and all those famous people in it.
The Happy Days of Garry Marshall is as warm as his shows. It aims for the same kind of heart, and it gets there.
But perhaps the most telling part of this tribute, and the one that might have most appealed to Marshall, is a final montage of clips that includes the Happy Days episode where the Fonz goes water-skiing.
That episode, in which The Fonz leapfrogs a shark, carved itself a permanent place not just in popular culture history, but in the American language because it inspired the phrase “jump the shark.”
The phrase is not, of course, a compliment. It suggests the point at which a previously good show went too far and started to become, often, a parody of itself.
So, putting that scene in a show praising the quality of Marshall’s work might seem like a slap. More than even money says he would have found it hilarious.