Blansky's Beauties

This was one of those mid-season fillers the networks threw out to see if it stuck. Throwing together a cast of pretty, semi-recognizable faces ("Hey! Isn't that the chick from that OTHER show?"), a generous laugh-track to mask predictable/ un-funny jokes and a pretense to see women in various stages of undress, this show exemplified how formulaic and un-original programming had become in the 70's. This review has already gone on longer than the actual series lasted, so I'll just quit here, since no one over the age of 30 will ever need to suffer through it.

Who's the genius who thought this was a good idea?

Horrible show full of forced laughter. While it was tied in to Happy Days no one seemed to notice that the shows were set in two different decades, the fifties and the seventies. Nancy Walker just showed up on Happy Days and they ignored the time warp. On Blansky, Eddie Mekka announces that he's going to visit his cousin Carmine on Laverne and Shirley, also set in the fifties. It's sad that a truly funny and smart comedian, Nancy Walker, walked into this dog of a show and tried to make it work. I guess she wanted to play lead once in her life. I'm glad to see that they cleaned up the hit-making formula when they got around to Joanie-Loves-Chachi a few years later.

This show had every 70's teeny bopper element aimed to appeal to the lowest intellect and thus make it a hit - except this time cute boys and inane, jiggly, dumb blondes were not enough to cover for horrible scripts, contrived situations, bad acting, and unbelievable plots. The show tried to be a spin-off/tie-in to Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley (or at least ride on their success) by utilizing actors - most notably Eddie Mekka and Scott Baio - from those shows and making the title role the cousin of Happy Days' Howard Cunningham. Having Nancy Walker as its star, scantily-clad bimbos wiggling around the set, and pretty boy co-stars to elicit screams from young girls in the audience, however, could never have saved it from itself.

This show is best forgotten in a footnote to bad television.

I suppose this is a minority view, but I do not consider Blansky's Beauties to be a spinoff of Happy Days. The facts are these: Nancy Walker appeared as Nancy Blansky in a cameo on the Happy Days Third Anniversary Show, Feb 5 1977. Blansky's Beauties debuted one week later on Feb 12.

So yes, Nancy Blansky appeared on Happy Days before she appeared on Blansky's Beauties. But the fact remains that Blansky's Beauties existed as a series, in every way except having been broadcast, before the Happy Days cameo, which I would therefore classify as a crossover.