Laverne & Shirley

It's late 50s. Working class best friends Laverne DeFazio (Penny Marshall) and Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams) are roommates in a Milwaukee basement apartment. Shirley is the sweet one and Laverne is the tougher one. Laverne's favorite drink is milk and Pepsi. Shirley has her stuffed animals like Boo Boo Kitty. They are Fonzie's friends working at the Shotz Brewery with annoying former classmate Lenny (Michael McKean) and Squiggy (David L. Lander). Laverne's father Frank DeFazio (Phil Foster) owns the Pizza Bowl. He starts dating the girls' landlord Edna Babish (Betty Garrett). Their school friend Carmine Ragusa (Eddie Mekka) is a Golden Gloves boxer, singer, and dance teacher.

This popular sitcom is a spin-off from Happy Days. Over the years, there are cameos and cross-over from the mother show. The girls stay independent modern women as they search for Mr. Right. Laverne is hounded by her father to get married and have children. Shirley has a long running romance with Carmine. The sixth season starts with Frank and Edna in California about four years later. When the bottling department gets replaced with machines, the girls follow them to Burbank. They are joined by Carmine, Lenny & Squiggy. The gang is befriended by their new neighbors Rhonda Lee and Sonny St. Jacques. The show fades a little and the move to California doesn't help. California takes away the midwest working class vibe although the show continues to have fun like the earthquake.

This show is legendary for the fights between Williams and the Marshall clan. It never got into the way of the fun on screen except for the last season. Cindy Williams got pregnant and a lawsuit followed. She would miss most of the last season and is the final nail on the coffin. The girls' friendship is modeled after Lucy and Ethel especially during their physical comedy gags. The gags are always fun. I love getting hung up on the coat rack. It's silly fun.

The girls struggle to move beyond singledom. Even with Carmine, Shirley could never go off with him for fear of splitting the girls apart. That is the Archilles heel of the show. The obvious move is for the girls to have more work situations and marry them off in a double wedding. They could live in connected apartments. The show never got to that point. This is a classic girl friendship show but it couldn't figure out how to get past the single girl stage.

When Laverne and Shirley first debuted on Happy Days, little did anyone know that that supposed one off appearance would lead to a classic. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams were perfect as the wild Laverne and the prissy Shirley. However, the rest of the cast deserves credit for this excellent slice of life comedy, especially Michael McKeon and David Lander as everyone's favorite losers Lenny and Squiggy. But the thing that made this show great was the fact that it was one of the all-time great slapsctick comedies.

Laverne and Shirley was one of my personal favorites growing up. Of course, we had reruns and repeats in those days. I loved Laverne and Shirley. They were the underdogs and perfectly suited as roommates and best friends. They were played brilliantly by Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams. Unfortunately, the show never recovered after Cindy Williams left to have her daughter and who could blame her. She was happily married to Bill Hudson, Kate's father, for twenty years with two children. Penny Marshall and the gang did their best to recover but never fully did. The reason and there are many that this show was so popular was the physical antics that Laverne and Shirley got into. I don't know if I preferred Milwaukee or Burbank but the supporting cast was top notch featuring Lenny and Sqiggy who could have had their own show. The delightful Carmine as the aspiring dancer. Elaine Joyce as the beautiful neighbor in Burbank. Betty Garrett and Al Molinaro as the landlady and Mr. Defazio. The show had plenty of it's moments too and great guest stars. It's certainly still a beloved show even in repeats.

Laverne & Shirley was one of several spin-offs of the popular 1970s Miller/Milkis series Happy Days and centered on two blue collar women living in Wisconsin in the late 1950s/early 1960s. The show was quite popular although it was dismissed by serious critics at the time and returning to it years after the fact only highlights its success. The women, played to perfection by Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, were good-hearted, hard-working individuals making their way in the world on their own power. The show features lots of slapstick humor - which was looked down upon at this time - but it is because of it that this show actually holds up better than such controversial critical darlings of the period such as All in the Family or Maude, which come off as far more dated - even annoyingly so. After this show's demise, it would be many years - until the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, that two talented actresses would again headline a comedy series featuring copious slapstick. Marshall usually got the best lines which she could hit out of the ballpark, but Williams was a tremendous comedienne herself and an able straight man to Marshall's antics - an issue fully realized when the show was without her in its final season. They were ably supported by a venerable cast featuring the idiotic greasers upstairs Lenny & Squiggy (the immortal Michael McKean and David L. Lander), Shirley's steadfast boxer/singer boyfriend Carmine (cute Eddie Mekka), Laverne's bull-headed father Phil Foster, and kind landlady and Laverne's future stepmom Betty Garrett. Guest visits by Carol Ita White as the bane of Laverne's existence - Rosie Greenbaum - were hilarious. Particularly memorable series moments abounded, but two of the best included a murder mystery-themed train trip and a crossover episode with Happy Days featuring a side-splitting square dance. The series started to deteriorate when producers moved the action to save costs from Milkwaukee to California, with all the regulars improbably in tow. New semi-regulars were added to little avail including Leslie Easterbrook as a blonde bombshell named Rhonda Lee and Ed Marinaro as a beefcake neighbor with designs on Laverne. Both actors were perfectly fine, but the writers never seemed to know what to do exactly with Easterbrook and Marinaro ultimately vanished with barely a nod. The talented and criminally underused Garrett left the show with little fanfare as well. Then the final nail was the departure of Williams after acrimonious contract disputes in a ridiculously improbable scenario which left the show without its trademark dynamic. While Marshall was a talented comedic actress, a straight woman was desperately required. A rotating roster of guest stars including Vicky Lawrence, Carrie Fisher and Laraine Newman made their way through, but none of them sparked like Williams did and the show finally whimpered out of existence. Even on that note, the majority of the seasons preceding are definitely filled with hilarity and uplifting fun.

If you seen the movie Wayne's World, there's a reference to the original show Laverne and Shirley where Wayne and Garth parody the intro to the show by working at a factory in Milwaukee, that's how i know the show and also watched it in reruns on TV Land as I was too young to remember the last episode more than 35 years ago. The success of this show led to a cartoon in which the main characters join the army; that cartoon was made by Hanna Barbera, who also did another show with Paramount called Fonz and the Happy Days Gang which later teamed up with Mork and Mindy for an hour long show on saturday mornings. Before this show came out, the producers of the show came out with the hit show Happy Days which was a spinoff show of Love, American Style. Happy Days also spun off Joannie Love Chachi which featured the late Erin Moran. All of these shows first aired on ABC during ABC's glory years in the late 1970s. It's a funny show!!!