Laverne & Squiggy & Chuck & Rhonda: The Bizarre Last Season of Laverne and Shirley

Here’s a little confession – I love Laverne and Shirley.  Yes, it’s goofy, broad and quite behind the times (avoid The Bully Show at all costs), but there’s something about watching two women struggle against the odds to figure out who they are and survive in an environment that is considerably hostile to them, two single women trying to date.  For all of the traditionalism that soaks into the narrative through the girls’ pursuit of guys and marriage, there are just as many episodes (“The Feminine Mistake” and “2001: A Sitcom Odyssey”) that served as a burgeoning support pillars for the nascent feminist movement that was just trying to grasp the concept that it was okay to want a fair wage, stay unmarried and be less than classically feminine.

The show suffered through some growing pains on its way to the eighth season.  Running out of fresh material, they chose to move the girls to Los Angeles, take them into the 60s and submerge them into the culture of the swinging, movie-mad era of the time.  The girls go from worshiping Fabian to lusting after the Beatles, but little else changes besides the size of their set and the introduction of a flighty-surfaced/iron cored blonde actress/dancer/model named Rhonda Lee

Then Cindy Williams became pregnant, and the show dealt with that fact very poorly.

They might have chosen to hide Cindy behind bags, but instead they decided that Shirley would finally get married and achieve her series-long dream of motherhood.  The obvious target of those yearnings might have been Carmine Ragusa, Shirley’s earstwile boyfriend of multiple seasons, who had moved across the country to be with her just two years before.  But instead the producers chose to give Shirley her dream and have her marry a doctor – Walter Meeney – after an offscreen whirlwind courtship.

This proved a problem for several reasons.  One is that the audience was legitimately invested in Carmine and Shirley’s romance, and it was sent off with a shrug on the part of both characters after they’d spent seasons four through seven growing gradually closer. Another is that they were given no chance to get to know Walter – and thanks to writing and production choices, never would. The third is that the loose plan for Shirley’s onscreen pregnancy would be to ship Walter off to war so that Laverne and Shirley would have to stay living together – meaning that Walter and Shirley’s marriage would be a meaningless vehicle for Shirley to become a mom, and that Shirley was only becoming one because Cindy and Bill Hudson were expecting.  Not sensible for a romantic like Shirl, and out of character.

After a wedding where the groom was literally wrapped in bandages from head to toe and Laverne acted as a proxy groom, Shirley and Laverne spent only one more episode together, in which the pregnancy was announced, before conflicts between the producers and Cindy Williams resulted in in her firing, a lawsuit and years of bad blood.  Williams would ultimately end up settling for a three pilot deal that never saw the light of day – and in the meantime Laverne was shunted off into an alien world in which her best friend no longer existed.

The solution seemed to be to shove Laverne into the arms of a guest star every week.   And if there wasn’t a guest star, then there was a strange concept to be beheld.

If Adam West wasn’t trying to Vertigo Laverne into a dead-on replica of his dead ex-partner, then we we were spending entire episodes watching Frank try to run for city council.  There was an immortally bizarre episode where Laverne’s apartment is haunted by the ghost of a distance runner from the 1800s who possesses lookalike Frank so he can ameliorate his own Olympics failure.   There’s the time where Laverne goes to a convent after feeling guilty over an orgy gone awry (no really, she leaves a ship after a drunken night with a bunch of sailors and they all saluted her.  And tooted the big horn) and meets a nun who speaks solely through the language of pickles. 

But Shirley wasn’t the only missing.  The Lenny half of Lenny and Squiggy, the girls’ notorious, ridiculous foils disappeared when Michael McKean opted out of most of the season to film “This is Spinal Tap” (Never let it be said that McKean isn’t a smart cookie).  The only good episode from the entire season features Lenny and Squiggy teaming up with Frank and Carmine to try and find buried treasure, only to run into Nevada’s nuclear testing grounds.   Lenny was largely replaced by Chuck, a Star-Trek loving dude played by a pe-Roger Rabbit Charles Fleischer. 

There are some good things to say about the season.  Laverne explores her own independence more than ever during the year, becoming a space suit tester, and David Lander steps forth and delivers a lot of good comedy – he remains the show’s saving grace when it goes sideways.   There’s a weirdly poignant episode where he portrays Squiggy’s sister, Squendolyn, whose attraction to Carmine is rebuffed bluntly by the former, providing a lesson for Carmine in not judging a book by its cover.

But it’s ultimately the high focus on Carmine that drags the series down.  After trying to portray him as a successful musician (Once you see it, you will never forget the sight of several dozen extras Doing the Carmine in a knock-off American Bandstand set under Jay Leno’s direction), Carmine was sent off to New York to co-star in a production of Hair.  Among random musical numbers he found himself living with his co-star in a one-room coldwater apartment.    This proved to be the show’s final  episode, so yes, the last episode of Laverne and Shirley was about neither Laverne nor Shirley, though Penny Marshall did get in a cameo appearance in which she gave her savings to Carmine so he could jumpstart his dream.  Oh, and she shared an awkward smooch with her best girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend, which isn’t weird at all.

 By all accounts the show ran on a little too long – it would have been better had it ended somewhere in season seven, if Shirley had married Carmine, if they’d turned the show into an exploration of the turbulent 60s while maintaining the same level of slapstick.   But the eighth season continues to historically result in LAS’ downfall thirty plus years later, ruining its value on the syndication market whenever it rolls around.