Seasons 1 and 2 of Happy Days were terrific, and hold up well today. Starting with Season 3 it went downhill fast.
Two reasons for this:
1. Starting with Season 3, the show was filmed before a studio audience. This really was noticeable in the Cunningham house: the formal dining room that separated the living room from the kitchen disappeared, and was replaced with a combination living/dining room. Also the living room lost a lot of its best features/qualities. Overall, the show became a lot more static & confined due to the studio filming. There were far fewer “remote” locations used. (Remember seeing the hardware store run by Howard? It was never seen again after the first two seasons.)
2. When Fonzie became the focus of the show, rather than a secondary character, the story lines lost a lot of the 50’s charm that was so evident in the first two seasons.
Spot on.
I was a kid and loved Happy Days and even I noticed that it just "looked different" in season 3. I really liked the first 2 seasons and it looked like it was shot like a movie, instead in S3 they started to look like all the other noticeably cheaper looking sitcoms of era.
The Fonzie stuff is crazy because Henry Winkler is so so so so just NOT that guy at all.
You mean a nerdy Jewish guy is not an Italian biker? That's why it is such great acting.
Sitcoms really seem to belong to a previous era of TV.
They need not be, but I think you’re right. I tried watching a new sitcom “Not Dead Yet” the other day and you would have thought it was written by an AI programmed to turn Twitter into a screenplay. “Ghosts,” which “Not Dead Yet” is all but a ripoff of, seems to have been written by the same program. Just a guess on my part, but based on observation it seems like all the good TV writers are on drama series these days.
Sitcoms really seem to belong to a previous era of TV.
They need not be, but I think you’re right. I tried watching a new sitcom “Not Dead Yet” the other day and you would have thought it was written by an AI programmed to turn Twitter into a screenplay. “Ghosts,” which “Not Dead Yet” is all but a ripoff of, seems to have been written by the same program. Just a guess on my part, but based on observation it seems like all the good TV writers are on drama series these days.
Really good writers are definitely going to TV drama.
Even though your thread says sitcoms, I am going to say Angel, although Buffy is more widely regarded as the superior show, I ended up enjoying Angel at times more than Buffy.