Garry Marshall was the executive producer of a string of sitcoms that helped the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) win the ratings race for the first time in the network’s history in the late 1970s. While Norman Lear’s Tandem Productions and Grant Tinker’s MTM Enterprises had put the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) on top in the early part of the decade, by the end of the 1978–79 season, four of the five highest- rated shows of the year were Marshall’s.

Marshall became a comedy writer during the last years of television’s “golden age.” He started out as an itinerant joke writer for an assortment of TV comics and eventually secured a staff writing position on The Joey Bishop Show. There he met Jerry Belson, with whom he would go on to write two feature films, a Broadway play, and episodes for a variety of TV series, including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lucy Show, and I Spy. The last project Marshall and Belson did together was the most successful of their partnership. The Odd Couple, a series they adapted from the Neil Simon play in 1970, would run for five seasons and have a major impact on Marshall’s comic style.

Rather than forming his own independent production company, which had become standard procedure for producers at the time, Marshall remained at Paramount to make a succession of hit situation comedies for ABC. Happy Days debuted as a series in January 1974, and by the 1976–77 season, it was the most popular show on TV. Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 1950s and centered around a teenager (Ron Howard), his family, and his friends, Happy Days generated three spin-offs, all of which Marshall supervised. Laverne and Shirley featured two working-class women (Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams), whose antic schemes were reminiscent of those portrayed on I Love Lucy. Viewers were introduced to the frenetic young comic Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy, a series about an alien (Williams) who comes to Earth to study human behavior by moving in with an all- American young woman (Pam Dawber). Joanie Loves Chachi followed two of the younger characters from Happy Days as they struggled to make it as rock-and-roll musicians.

While Norman Lear had used such shows as All in the Family and Maude to explore contemporary social issues such as racism, the women’s movement, and the war in Vietnam, Marshall’s shows were usually more concerned with less timely, personal issues, such as blind dates, making out, and breaking up. Lear, Tinker, and others had attracted young audiences with “relevant” programming earlier in the decade; Marshall attracted even younger ones with lighter, more escapist fare, most of it set in the supposedly simpler historic past. In an interview reprinted in American Television Genres (1985), Marshall recalled that, after producing the adult-oriented Odd Couple, he had been anxious to make shows “that both kids and their parents could watch.” When he gave a speech on accepting the Lifetime Achievement Prize given at the American Comedy Awards in 1990, Marshall said, “If television is the education of the American people, then I am recess.” Not surprisingly, four of Marshall’s sitcoms were adapted into Saturday morning cartoons.

Marshall continued to borrow from The Odd Couple throughout his career. Over and over again, he employed the comic device of coupling two distinctly different characters: the hip and the square on Happy Days, the earthling and the Orkan on Mork and Mindy, the rich and the poor on Angie, and, later, the businessman and the prostitute in the movie Pretty Woman. In 1982 he brought a short-lived remake of The Odd Couple to ABC, this time with African Americans Ron Glass and Demond Wilson playing the parts of Felix and Oscar.

By the mid-1980s, Marshall had turned his attention to directing, producing, and occasionally writing feature films, including Young Doctors in Love (1982), The Flamingo Kid (1984), Nothing in Common (1986), Overboard (1987), Beaches (1989), Pretty Woman (1990), Frankie and Johnny (1991), Runaway Bride (1999), and The Princess Diaries (2001). He also began appearing on screen occasionally, most notably in a recurring role on Murphy Brown.

Marshall’s television tradition was carried on by Thomas L. Miller and Robert L. Boyett, two alumni of Marshall’s production staff. Their youth-oriented series, such as Perfect Strangers, Full House, and Family Matters, became staples of ABC’s lineup in the later 1980s and early 1990s.