Living in a country that still venerates the sitcom “Dad’s Army”, I find it odd that “Happy Days”, set a decade later, is nowhere to be found on UK streaming services.
I last saw “Happy Days” about twenty years ago on Channel 4, whose mornings remain full of old sitcoms like “Cheers” and “Frasier”, which were also produced by Paramount. With no other TV channel airing the show, I thought it must be found online on Paramount+, but it wasn’t there. Paramount runs two other streaming services in the UK, Pluto TV and My5, the latter through their ownership of Channel 5, but “Happy Days” was not there either. Also nowhere to be found were any series spun off from the show, like “Laverne & Shirley”, “Joanie Loves Chachi” and “Mork & Mindy”.
A sitcom about 1950s teenage life growing up in the American Midwest, arriving in the same moment as the film “American Graffiti” and the original stage production of “Grease”, “Happy Days” ran on the ABC network for so long – January 1974 to July 1984 – that it was set in the early 1960s by its end. Starring Ron Howard as archetypal teenager Richie Cunningham, with Marion Ross and Tom Bosley as his parents, the Bugs Bunny of the show turned out to be their lodger, Arthur Fonzarelli, an effortlessly cool leather-jacketed greaser mechanic on a motorcycle, who turned on jukeboxes just by knocking them, and who owned the show’s catchphrases: “sit on it”, “Ayyyyy...” and “Whoa”. Henry Winkler, as “the Fonz” or “Fonzie” was the star of “Happy Days” long before Howard left the show in 1980, at which point Fonzarelli had become a high school teacher and a pillar of society.
I don’t think there is a specific reason for “Happy Days” falling off the radar. The phrase “jumping the shark”, for when a series exhausts its original premise and mutates into something else entirely, comes from “Fonzie” doing exactly that on a fifth-season episode in 1977, taking advantage of Henry Winkler’s experience as a water-skiing instructor – the same season also saw Robin Williams make his first appearance as the alien Mork, before getting his own show.
However, these were only the latest “jumps”. With “Fonzie” moving to the foreground after the first season, what began as a more filmic show, shot with a single camera and canned laughter, “Happy Days” was filmed in front of an increasingly raucous studio audience after the second season. Even bigger was the changing of the sitcom’s “sit”, as Winkler was established as the sole lead after Ron Howard left. I don’t remember seeing many episodes without Howard, suggesting the eighth season onward may have been too different a show when taking “Happy Days” as a whole – again, I can’t see it to check.
Before the advent of streaming, Paramount only released the first six of the show’s eleven seasons on DVD, with only the third and fourth seasons retaining the original music used - the show’s atmosphere was set with much use of needle drops and the cast singing what were now “golden oldies” for the audience. Nostalgia for that period of music and culture has also receded with passing generations, but with the post-war baby boom seeing the birth of popular music and of popular culture, as we understand it today, happening in the 1950s, it remains an important point to which culture still returns – as of July 2024, a proposed BBC radio service concentrating on music from the 1950s, 60s and 70s is held up while further consultations determine if it is not stepping on the toes of the aptly-named Boom Radio.
This is one more nail in the coffin of thinking that streaming services would be great repositories of television and film history, especially with Paramount having begun in 1912. It is possible that “Happy Days”, or any show not produced in the last forty years, is no longer nostalgic or profitable enough for inclusion on any of their services, to which I think: “Cheers”, you’re next.
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