It remained for Garry Marshall … to blend the two dominant forms of sitcom forms into a single, notoriously popular show: Laverne & Shirley (1976–). We can be even more specific: Marshall and co-creators Mark Rothman and Lowell Ganz invented a single character … Shirley Feeney—who could express both slapstick and sentiment, who was both Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore.

The idea here was to put a Mary Richards character into Lucy situations, and to play her adorable fastidiousness against a more pragmatic, good-time-Charlotte colleague: … Laverne De Fazio. Marshall, Ganz, and Rothman had turned the trick before, in The Odd Couple (1971–75) … and it was frequently a funny show. But someone realized the premise would work better if these two arrested adolescents were closer to teen age, if they were working-class, if they were women, and if the show were set in the Fifties. (p. 56)

To get the money for tickets to a posh Sunday-night cocktail party, the girls have spent the whole weekend as guinea pigs at a sadistic research lab—Laverne going without sleep, Shirley without food. By the time they arrive at the party, where they're anxious to make a particularly good impression on the men in attendance, Laverne is exhausted and Shirley famished. But, I don't know, somehow they can't find a place for Laverne to sit down, or an entree to the buffet table. Suddenly, Shirley spots a shrimp one guest has dropped on the floor nearby. She stares at her good fortune for a beat, takes two dainty little-lady steps toward the shrimp, then jumps up and, in midair, assumes a dog-on-all-fours posture, lands on the floor in that position, snatches up the goodie, gobbles it down, stands up, turns to Laverne and says, with a lovely mixture of poise and exuberance, "I feel worlds better." The capper to the scene comes when Laverne, having found a chair, nods off, tilts forward, and is carried by her momentum into a world-class, splayed-legged somersault onto the floor.

Masterpiece Theatre this is not. It may not even be what Norman Lear describes as "theater" (his definition of a successful, "adult" sitcom). It is, however, a small masterpiece of physical comedy—which is all that interests Garry Marshall, and which is enough to be grateful for. Lear and Marshall have some of the same bio contours … but their notions of TV comedy are as far apart as Tuckahoe and Milwaukee. Tell Marshall that TV shows should have a message, and he'd say messages are for Mailgrams. "Entertainment with something to say" is fine for Norman Lear; the Marshall shows have nothing to say (oh, one Happy Days segment did take a bold stand against cigarettes), and they say it very well.

It was one small step for the Marshall clan from the adolescent hijinks displayed in Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days to the bonkers infantilism of Mork And Mindy. Again, the premise is antique: Put a superior creature (a Boston schoolmarm, say, or an Orkan ambassador) in a strange new environment (the Old West, or Boulder, Colo.), and the natives (the cowboys, or a nice young woman named Mindy) will find the aristocrat bizarre, inferior, childish. (pp. 56-7)