What exactly happened in 1980?

[Pug Lover]

I know there was a changeover of some kind that year.It showed in the fall with some unexplained changes to Mork & Mindy.
It would seem that the same thing happened to both Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley.During that same fall season,both shows experienced changes that seemed to happen quite suddenly,from out of the blue.
On Happy Days,Richie and Ralph Malph were gone,and said to have been drafted in the army in Greenland.Storylines focused more on Fonzie,as well as Joanie and Chachi's romance.Plus new characters like Roger Phillips and Jenny Piccalo were added to the cast.(The latter character had only been mentioned but never seen in previous seasons.)But I know that Ron Howard left to focus more on his movie directing career.
Meanwhile,the Laverne & Shirley characters got a major change of scenery by being moved out to California.The season opened with Frank and Edna having moved to California to open a new eatery.After quitting their job at Shotz Brewery,the girls decided to move out west too,and were quickly followed by Lenny,Squiggy and Carmine.Not a word about whatever happened to The Pizza Bowl.

[robyrob]

the network went crazy and decided to make a bunch of wholesale changes - M&M seemed to get hurt the worst by it, although I don't think the majority of those changes were any good at all and didn't help the ratings either.

[catlover79]

Originally Posted by robyrob

the network went crazy and decided to make a bunch of wholesale changes - M&M seemed to get hurt the worst by it, although I don't think the majority of those changes were any good at all and didn't help the ratings either.

I still think one of the main reasons M&M tanked in fall 1980 was - MEARTH!! I remember seeing the M&M reruns and being absolutely traumatized by this huge, grown man wearing nothing but a diaper and babbling like a baby. You know how some people have a childhood fear of clowns that they never outgrow? Well, in my case, it's a fear of Mearth!!

[biffbronson]

In defense of ABC when it came to Happy Days, the network was still riding the wave of a very popular series with a wildly popular character (Winkler's Fonzie). Erin Moran and Scott Baio also were quite popular, with Baio prominently featured in teen mags. Fans today it seems have little to no appreciation for their work -- especially Winkler, who is treated like a stale salami on message boards. And of course, there were still other great actors remaining: Bosley, Ross, and Molinaro.

Obviously with the departures of Ron Howard and Don Most, the cast would have been a little thin without some new characters (or newly revealed, in the case of Cathy Silvers' Piccalo). Most of them were a bust. But there's a reason the series went on post-Howard: Ratings. Not all of the show's viewership departed when Howard left, and there had been a very large audience. I couldn't have been that tasteless just because I still enjoyed it...! LOL

[TV_on_the_Porch]

Wow, let's see if I can sort all of this out. First of all, there are changes being cited in this thread that were implemented in 1979, 80 and 81. ABC had an apparent sense of invincibility in 1979 and that fall it moved several of its biggest hits to new nights in order to conquer those time periods too, which resulted in failure of varying magnitude in each instance.

Fantasy Island, which had been moved to Friday, took the worst hit in the ratings but that turned out to be good in the long run because it was moved back to Saturday nights within weeks and regained its audience, so it really didn't suffer as a result. Laverne & Shirley moved from Tuesday to Thursday and did OK there, but not as well as it had on Tuesdays--and not as well as Mork & Mindy had done in the same slot previously. After a brief, disastrously stupid move to Mondays (to get totally clobbered by WKRP in Cincinnati), L&S finally got put back-to-back with Happy Days for good.

Of course it was only the lame-brained scheduling decision on the part of the network that caused the drop in L&S's ratings, but did the suits recognize their own fallibility? HA! No, the characters' move to Hollywood in the fall of 1980 was a needless tweak to fix a problem that would not have even been if ABC had just left Laverne & Shirley on Tuesdays in the fall of 1979.

Which brings us to Mork & Mindy (bout time too considering where this is posted). After its hugely successful freshman season, ABC made two errors with M&M in the fall of 1979 that started the show on a long, painful slide to oblivion. The first was moving the show from Thursday to Sunday. Except...that, for a couple/few weeks anyway, seemed to be a gamble that paid off as Mork & Mindy was in the top 10 and virtually tied with Archie Bunker's Place. But then ol Arch held his ground while Mork started to retreat in the ratings. And that was due to the second, far more egregious error on ABC's part concerning Mork & Mindy: they had made wholesale changes to the show prior to the start of the season based on what some surveys told them that the audience wanted to see. In other words, they broke the greatest common sense rule: don't f**k with success!

Based on test results that showed young people only want to watch young people on TV, they canned Conrad Janis and Elizabeth Kerr for Jay Thomas and Gina Hecht...and we know how well that turned out. The storylines suddenly turned preachy and heavy-handed too--what a brilliant concept for a lightweight comedy!

Mork & Mindy would return to Thursdays in January but it would never regain its first-year popularity even after obvious efforts to reverse the damage. Ironically, one of the efforts of damage reversal turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back...the one change that finally caused the bottom to drop out of Mork & Mindy's ratings: the introduction of Mearth in the fall of 1981.

So there you have it...ABC's bone-headed scheduling decisions in 1979 had lasting effects that were still being made manifest in 1980 and 1981!

[TV_on_the_Porch]

Ron Howard's defection from Happy Days in 1980 was really unrelated to any of this; he just was ready to move on.

[catlover79]

Originally Posted by TDRyan

Ron Howard's defection from Happy Days in 1980 was really unrelated to any of this; he just was ready to move on.

Yeah, he wanted to direct and do other things - which turned out to be the best decision! Has anyone else seen one of his first post-HD roles in a TV movie called Bitter Harvest? He was AMAZING in that movie!!

[tmac81s]

Happy Days....its changes in 1980 were mostly from Ron Howard and Donny Most choosing to leave the series.

Laverne & Shirley....in the fall of 1979, ABC moved it to Thursdays in hopes to win that time slot....the result was, it went from being TV's #1 show to ending the season at #39. They moved it back to it's old Tuesday time slot (between Happy Days & Three's Company), but they felt moving the show to California would also help bring back up the ratings (and give new storytelling opportunities.) Unfortunately the damage was done, and it never returned to the top 10.

Mork & Mindy....as mentioned above the scheduling change to Sunday, coupled with the cast changes that resulted from the "focus groups," crippled the series.

personally, I think there were many good episodes from all the series after this. (although I've only seen one s4 M&M episode, and that was a long time ago.)

[TVFactFan]

Doesn't matter what happened in 1980, the show was already done by that time. Guess it was supposed to say what happened in 1979