Point out “Blissful Days” to TV viewers of a sure age (raises hand) and the very first thing they keep in mind is perhaps not an episode or a scene or a catchphrase however a lunchbox. I’m particularly pondering of a cool Thermos-brand one — that includes Henry Winkler because the present’s pop-phenom greaser, Arthur Fonzarelli, a.okay.a. Fonzie, a.okay.a. the Fonz — which luckier ’70s children than I acquired to schlep their PBJs to high school in and which is now within the assortment of the Smithsonian.
To recollect “Blissful Days” is to recollect your youth, which was additionally the perform of “Blissful Days” when it premiered in 1974. Nicely, not less than it type of was. Ostensibly the present appealed to grown-ups who have been younger throughout its time interval — roughly, the mid-50s to mid-60s, over 11 seasons. However a few of its most ardent followers have been the lunchbox-toters toddling down another person’s reminiscence lane.
Now “Blissful Days” is 50 years outdated. Or is it? Time will get fuzzy while you enter the “Blissful Days”-verse. In some methods the sequence by no means ended; it was simply handed down via the tradition like a classic varsity jacket. It was repurposed as a nostalgia object by the Spike Jonze video for Weezer’s 1994 single “Buddy Holly.” In 1998, “That ’70s Present” set its personal reverie, like “Blissful Days,” amongst a gang of teenage pals in Wisconsin. Final 12 months, that sequence’s sequel, “That ’90s Present,” created a ’90s model of the ’70s model of the ’50s.
If all this math is an excessive amount of, all you should know is that there are solely ever two intervals in pop-culture nostalgia. There’s Then (easy, harmless, enjoyable), and there’s Now (scary, corrupt, complicated). Ultimately, Now turns into one other Now’s Then, and the cycle repeats. “Blissful Days” was nostalgic as a result of the youngsters weren’t smoking weed. “That ’70s Present” was nostalgic as a result of the youngsters have been smoking weed. We rock across the clock and across the calendar, returning ever once more to the start.
“Blissful Days” didn’t invent this sort of rosy retrospective reminiscence. However as a mass phenomenon, it was the present that cut up the atom of nostalgia and acquired us unstuck in time.
The sequence grew out of a broader Seventies vogue for the ’50s (and early ’60s), which included the musical and movie “Grease”; the hits “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John and “Yesterday As soon as Extra” by the Carpenters; and the films “The Lords of Flatbush” and “American Graffiti.” The ’70s additionally went via a short section of eager for the Thirties — that candy, untroubled decade! — which gave us “The Waltons” in addition to a short-lived selection present, additionally known as “Blissful Days.”
The creator of the extra well-known “Blissful Days,” Garry Marshall, was requested to develop a interval comedy for ABC. (A part of the pondering, he as soon as recalled, was that you simply couldn’t make an “trustworthy” present about ’70s teenagers that might cross the community censors.) He primarily based the premise on his personal youth, transposing his Bronx neighborhood to Milwaukee.
The present was additionally half of a bigger counterprogramming resolution to lean into feel-good, escapist sitcoms to counter CBS’s dominant lineup of socially related comedies (“M*A*S*H” on warfare, “All within the Household” and “Maude” on tradition warfare, “The Mary Tyler Moore Present” on feminism).
Within the Cunningham family, mom Marion (Marion Ross) whipped up biscuits and customary sense, whereas father Howard (Tom Bosley) chuckled in his cardigan sweater concerning the children today. Their naïve teen son Richie (Ron Howard) and his pals Potsie Weber (Anson Williams) and Ralph Malph (Donny Most) schemed to get their fingers on a set of wheels and to “go all the way in which” with gum-snapping women. (Richie had a youthful sister, Joanie, performed by Erin Moran; his older brother, Chuck, performed by a number of actors, went the way in which of Amelia Earhart someplace in Season 2.) Any hormonal antics normally ended with a healthful lesson and perhaps a milkshake getting dumped in somebody’s lap.
“Blissful Days,” in a manner, was the ’70s utilizing the ’50s to repudiate the ’60s, or not less than the divisive aftermath of them that fueled the one-liners in Archie Bunker’s lounge. It mythologized Center America as an honest place the place children necked in parked automobiles and everybody was basically good and pleased, the place household life was a pleasant tussle, not a warfare. The premiere 12 months, 1974, would see Richard Nixon’s resignation and the start of the Gerald Ford years. “Blissful Days” was a wager that the TV viewers needed a breather from controversy.
And what brings a divided nation of TV watchers collectively? TV. By 1974, tv was lastly sufficiently old to grow to be nostalgic for itself.
So “Blissful Days” was a present about TV, or not less than concerning the first TV technology. America first met Ron Howard as a baby star of black-and-white TV, as Opie Taylor on “The Andy Griffith Present.” The primary pilot of “Blissful Days” aired in 1972 as “Love and the Tv Set” (later retitled “Love and the Blissful Days”), an episode of the ABC anthology “Love American Model” concerning the Cunninghams’ changing into the primary household on their block to get a TV.
(This early model, curiously, was way more Norman Lear-like than the eventual sequence. Right here, Chuck Cunningham — an amiable jock in “Blissful Days” — refuses to say grace at dinner as a result of he’s questioning faith, whereas Howard Cunningham, performed right here by Harold Gould, is shocked to see “a coloured man” — the mail man — sitting in his chair on the household’s TV-viewing celebration.)
The Fifties have been when TV began telling American households learn how to be American households. The story could have been a lie — and will have neglected numerous precise households — however folks needed to imagine it.
The Cunninghams of “Blissful Days” spend their evenings watching Uncle Miltie and professional wrestling. When Richie desires to purchase a used jalopy, Howard factors to the Nelson boys of “Ozzie and Harriet”: “David and Ricky don’t have a automotive.” Within the Season 1 finale, Howard decides to construct a yard bomb shelter as a result of he was upset by an Edward R. Murrow particular on the Chilly Struggle.
The Cunninghams reproduce the ’50s sitcom nuclear household, however additionally they replace it, only a contact, discovering a compromise place between the Nelsons and the Bunkers. Marion is a dutiful homemaker, however she speaks her personal thoughts. Howard is an old school grump, however he’s too good to ever go full Archie. The youngsters insurgent, a little bit, however they’re pushed by hormones, not beliefs. In a second-season episode concerning the election of 1956, Richie defies his Republican father to help Adlai Stevenson — however solely to impress a lady.
Just like the previous itself, “Blissful Days” is healthier fondly remembered than rewatched. The primary few seasons are the present at its finest, candy and fluffy and enjoyable. Winkler, specifically, is astonishing. His early appearances have little dialogue; he does his speaking principally with seems and gestures, like a leather-jacket mime.
However because it turned successful, “Blissful Days” become a crowd-service machine. The ever-more common Fonzie turned the Monster That Ate Milwaukee. A Season 5 episode by which he water-ski-jumped over a shark turned a metaphor for the purpose at which a great present goes unhealthy.
Actually, there was an entire college of fins within the water. There have been melodramatic particular episodes. The catchphrases metastasized (“Aaaay!” “Sit on it!”). Marshall, performing on his son’s request that he add an alien to the present, solid the frenetic Robin Williams in a visitor spot as Mork from Ork, who would later head up “Mork & Mindy.” (“Blissful Days” additionally spun off “Laverne & Shirley” and “Joanie Loves Chachi,” amongst a number of others.)
The sequence’s legacy, although, is greater than the sum of its sharks. It harnessed the cultural pull of reminiscence, and it anticipated how the previous would grow to be extra inescapable the extra of it was captured on video.
Supercharged by TV, American nostalgia developed layers, like a lounge wallpapered as soon as a decade. The 2020s look again to the Nineties which regarded again to the Seventies which regarded again to the Fifties. Of the various causes that nostalgia by no means ends, the largest could also be that it’s chasing a fantasy, which is all the time not less than one technology out of grasp.
That is additionally what makes it potent, and never simply as leisure. The Fifties have been lionized by conservatives within the Reagan Eighties; the imagined previous is what places the “Once more” in “Make America Nice Once more.” (Nostalgia isn’t routinely reactionary as an artwork kind — “Blissful Days” was mildly ’70s centrist if it had any ideology in any respect — however it’s a more durable match with the progressive ideally suited of society advancing over time.)
The current can’t compete with a reminiscence, particularly a selective one. Because the critic John Leonard wrote, reviewing the “Blissful Days” premiere in The Instances underneath the pen identify Cyclops: “The fifties have been additionally a time when Joe McCarthy’s jugenbund ran round firing the lecturers in our faculties and the actors on our screens; when Egypt and Israel had one other warfare; when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary; when Adlai Stevenson was ridiculed by Richard Nixon for proposing an finish to A-bomb and H‐bomb testing. Blissful days!”
“Blissful Days,” atypically, as soon as made this level itself — via, of all characters, Mork. In 1979, with “Mork & Mindy” now an enormous hit, Robin Williams returned to “Blissful Days” for a fifth anniversary particular, by which Mork traveled again in time to go to an period “when life was less complicated, when issues have been humdrum.”
Many of the episode is a typical clip particular. Mork makes use of telepathy to summon characters’ reminiscences, within the type of scenes from the sitcom’s first 5 years. However it takes a flip on the finish, when he reviews his findings again to his Orkan superior, Orson (voiced by Ralph James).
The “Blissful Days” period, Mork says, was “a beautiful, naïve and romantic time.” However he provides that, when he reads his hosts’ minds, “All of them appear to dam out one factor”: McCarthy, the senator from the Cunninghams’ residence state of Wisconsin who spent his early Fifties whipping up a pink scare in Washington, D.C. “I suppose that’s why it’s so romantic,” Mork says, “as a result of they by no means keep in mind the unhappy issues.”
Within the 5 many years since 1974, TV nostalgia has grow to be extra plentiful and extra complicated. “The Surprise Years” was bittersweet (and finally acquired its personal reboot to diversify and complicate it). “Freaks and Geeks” gave us adolescence as fondly remembered torture. “Mad Males” savored its midcentury swellegance whereas telling us that nostalgia is “the ache from an outdated wound” and that the thought of the harmless previous is a superb American gross sales job. There’s even a type of TV anti-nostalgia, seen in reclaimed-pop-history tales like “Pam & Tommy,” which flatter viewers members with their superiority to the unevolved denizens of the previous.
The reality on the coronary heart of all these reveals, although, is identical because it was within the days of Richie and the Fonz. Half of what makes our bygone pleased days pleased is what we keep in mind of them. The opposite half is what we neglect.