Happy Days

Adored by Seinfeld, Fonzie and David Lynch, Frances Bay was Hollywood’s grandmother

Comedy comas are predictable, but Glee gets away with it by being earnest

Glee is still finding its way, and last night’s episode was a step backwards in some ways, forwards in others. They’re already having problems figuring out how to sustain the tone of the pilot or even the rules that govern the musical numbers; they’re getting close to doing full-fledged musical numbers that go beyond the boundaries of “real-life” performance, and I would not be at all surprised if people are breaking into song in the street by the time the season is over. Though one way or another, they’ll have to improve the lip-synching, an important part of any filmed musical (it’s not usually possible to do an elaborate musical number without singing to playback). I don’t know if it’s the lip-synching or the sound recording, which gives no suggestion of the acoustic of wherever they happen to be performing the number, but they simply don’t give the feeling that they’re doing these numbers in the room. (This is a very common problem on TV shows that do musical numbers. There’s no time to mix the sound of the song to really match the dialogue, so the dialogue and music wind up sounding like they were recorded in completely different rooms — which they were.)

You may have already seen Ron Howard’s mega-celebrity endorsement video, but here it is again. As to what I mean by the subject heading: Andy Taylor is a sheriff who constantly violates or stretches the letter of the law to let dangerous criminals like Otis off the hook, and he’s a liberal ACLU squish to boot. And the Fonz, well, that speaks for itself. This guy’s endorsement would not seem to be helpful. (Though he did endorse Eisenhower in one episode. “I like Ike, my bike likes Ike.” So maybe he has his finger on the pulse of the nation, and he has some claims to being bipartisan.)

Silly question of the day: when you’ve seen a sitcom dubbed into a foreign language, do they dub in a laugh track as well, or not?

The year is 1977. Under the leadership of Fred Silverman, ABC has become the number-one network with a combination of family-friendly comedies (Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley) and titillating “jiggle” shows (Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company). What next, Silverman asks himself? Why, how about combining the two — Get Garry Marshall to create a show that combines the family comedy of Happy Days with the titillation and frequent bralessness of Charlie’s Angels? And thus was born Blansky’s Beauties, starring Nancy Walker (Rhoda’s mom, the Bounty Towels lady) as the producer of a showgirl act in Las Vegas. The show was launched with a crossover episode of Happy Days, where Nancy Blansky was introduced as Tom Bosley’s cousin. And yet it bombed, and you will see why.

Just as an example of how historical accuracy is more important in today’s TV (especially if it’s Mad Men) than it used to be, here’s a screencap from an episode of Happy Days, back when the show was still set in the mid-’50s. The poster is for Roman Holiday, which is indeed a ’50s movie, but it says at the top that Audrey Hepburn is the star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which didn’t come out until the early ’60s. The set decorators obviously grabbed a poster for a ’60s reissue of Roman Holiday, and nobody corrected it because it was assumed, rightly, that normal people wouldn’t notice. But you can bet that you will never see Mad Men display a movie poster mentioning a movie that didn’t exist yet, because TV today is much more nitpicky about details.