["Happy Days"] is a sitcom about the ostensibly innocent fifties. The decade itself is presumed to be a sitcom…. Richie, Potsie and Fonzie are fixated on ponytails. They spend one half-hour wondering how "to go all the way" with a ponytail. They spend another half-hour wondering whether, if they had a car, they would automatically get a ponytail. They spend a third half-hour getting drunk with some Marines, in order to make themselves more worthy of ponytails….

ABC's shows do not pretend to deal with topical issues, and their premises are brazenly retrograde. Happy Days copies Dobie Gillis…. Laverne and Shirley's slapstick antics—usually built around wild schemes to earn money or meet men—are often indistinguishable from the adventures of Lucy and Ethel on I Love Lucy. Upon closer examination, however, the new shows prove to be quite unlike the older ones whose formulas they borrow; plots and characters may be similar, but the me...

"Happy Days" is a little more than the same old Henry Aldrich sandwich, dressed with the salt of more "relevance" and the store-bought mayonnaise of nostalgia. Taking its cue for potential success from such movies as "American Graffiti," the series is set in the nineteen-fifties and features the experience of a naive and cute-as-a-button teen-ager named Richie Cunningham…. Richie and his friends are supposed to be "revealing of the relatively carefree ...

[Happy Days] is the American Graffiti rip-off in which the producers made off with the movie's star (Ron Howard) and its ambience (small-town America in the 1950s), but with none of the sensitivity and sensibility that made the film memorable. Graffiti's adolescents were caught at a moment of subtle tension, when their comfortable pleasure with the familiar was challenged by their yearnings for a larger, more stimulating world—a world that scared them, yet beckoned them on into adulthoo...

"Happy Days" is something that could be good but, evidently, has decided to go the familiar route of "Dobie Gillis," "Father Knows Best," "Henry Aldrich" and "Andy Hardy." A ripoff of such movies as "American Graffiti" …, it is set in the fifties and is liberally sprinkled with the songs, clothes and props of the period. [Richie Cunningham], complete with adorable and understanding parents and siblings, is the attract...