Laverne & Shirley television sitcom

Laverne & Shirley (originally Laverne DeFazio & Shirley Feeney) is an American television sitcom that ran for eight seasons on ABC from January 27, 1976, to May 10, 1983. A spin-off of Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley followed the lives of Laverne DeFazio (Penny Marshall) and Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams), two friends and roommates who work as bottle-cappers in the fictitious Shotz Brewery in late 1950s Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

From the sixth season onwards, the series' setting changed to mid-1960s Burbank, California. Michael McKean and David Lander co-starred as their friends and neighbors Lenny and Squiggy, along with Eddie Mekka as Carmine Ragusa, Phil Foster as Laverne's father Frank DeFazio, and Betty Garrett as the girls' landlady Edna Babish. Noted for its use of physical comedy, Laverne & Shirley became the most-watched American television program by its third season, and was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award in 1979.

The series was a spin-off from Happy Days, as the two lead characters were originally introduced on that series as acquaintances of Fonzie (Henry Winkler). Set in roughly the same time period, the timeline started in approximately 1958, when the series began, through 1967, when the series ended. As with Happy Days, it was made by Paramount Television, created by Garry Marshall (along with Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman) and executive produced by Garry Marshall, Edward K. Milkis, and Thomas L. Miller from Miller-Boyett Productions. According to Michael Eisner, Cindy Williams had refused to do the Laverne & Shirley spin-off, so her role was recast with Liberty Williams (no relation), and a seven-minute screen test was filmed. Between that afternoon shoot and the evening, Cindy Williams was eventually talked into doing the role and the scene was re-filmed that night with who would become the lead actors.

Executives wanted to see both versions, but Eisner hid the first reel of film in a closet of the building and said at the screening that the film from the first shoot had gotten lost, so they only watched the performance of Cindy Williams with Penny Marshall. At the start of each episode, Laverne and Shirley are skipping down a Milwaukee street, arm in arm, reciting a Yiddish-American hopscotch chant: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated," which then leads into the series' theme song, "Making Our Dreams Come True" performed by Cyndi Grecco. The hopscotch chant is from Penny Marshall's childhood. For the first five seasons, from 1976 to 1980, the show was set in Milwaukee (executive producer Thomas L. Miller's home town), taking place from roughly 1958–59 through the early 1960s. Shotz Brewery bottle cappers and best friends, Laverne DeFazio and Shirley Feeney, live in a basement apartment, where they communicate with upstairs neighbors Lenny and Squiggy by screaming up the dumbwaiter shaft connecting their apartments.

Also included in the show are Laverne's father, Frank DeFazio, proprietor of the Pizza Bowl, and Edna Babish, the apartment building's landlady, who would later marry Frank. Shirley maintained an off-again on-again romance with dancer/singer/boxer Carmine Ragusa. During this period, characters from Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley would make occasional guest appearances on each other's series.

During the fifth season, the girls went into the Army, and they contended with a tough-as-nails drill sergeant named Alvinia T. Plout (Vicki Lawrence). For the sixth season in 1980, Laverne and Shirley and their friends all moved from Milwaukee to Burbank, California. The ladies took jobs at a department store, Frank and Edna managed a Texas barbecue restaurant called Cowboy Bill's, Carmine delivered singing telegrams and sought work as an actor, and Lenny and Squiggy started a talent agency called Squignowski Talent Agency. From this point until the end of the series' run, Laverne & Shirley was set in the mid-1960s.

In one of the shots in the show's new opening sequence, the ladies are seen kissing a 1964 poster of The Beatles. With each season, a new year passed in the timeline of the show, starting with 1965 in the 1980–81 season, and ending in 1967 with Carmine heading off for Broadway, to star in the musical Hair. When the series' setting changed to California, two new characters are added: Sonny St. Jacques, a stunt man, landlord of the Burbank apartment building and love interest for Laverne; as well as Rhonda Lee, the ladies' neighbor and an aspiring actress.

In March 1982, Cindy Williams became pregnant with her first child. In May, Williams and her manager-husband Bill Hudson presented a list of demands to accommodate her pregnancy and pending childbirth, which Paramount refused. In August, two episodes into production of the series' eighth season, Williams left the show and filed a $20 million lawsuit against Paramount. The case was later settled out of court and Williams was released from her contract. As for Shirley, she quickly falls in love in the two episodes produced before Williams' departure, and marries Army medic Walter Meany (making her Shirley Feeney Meany).

In Williams' final scenes, Shirley discovers that she is pregnant. Shirley's absence is explained with a note left for Laverne saying that she had left town quickly to join her husband overseas. Despite the departure of Williams, ratings held steady and Laverne & Shirley ranked at #25 for the 1982–83 season. ABC asked Penny Marshall to return for a ninth year, but she insisted that the show move its production base from Los Angeles to New York. Eyeing the cost of such an endeavor, and given the age of the show, ABC quietly canceled Laverne & Shirley in May 1983 after 178 episodes. The final episode was produced like a backdoor pilot for a spin-off series for Carmine, who was shown moving to New York City to star in the Broadway show Hair. Laverne was only to be seen at the beginning and end of the episode. The spin-off never materialized. Read More