On January 15, 1974, the hit sitcom Happy Days began its ten-year run on ABC. The debut episode, “All the Way,” revolves around Richie Cunningham (played by Ron Howard) going on a date with a girl who has a reputation for being promiscuous. Richie is nervous because of his inexperience, but is relieved when he learns the rumors about the girl aren’t true. He initially tells his friends that he went all the way with her, but eventually comes clean, conveniently after Fonzie (Henry Winkler) makes a date with her, thinking she’s a sure thing.“All the Way” wasn’t the first attempt at turning the concept of Happy Days into a regular show. Michael Eisner and Tom Miller originally wrote a script with a similar 1950s theme in 1971 and were unable to sell it. They reworked it into a pilot called New Family in Town, which also wasn’t picked up but was incorporated into the anthology series Love, American Style the following year. When George Lucas saw the footage, he decided to cast Ron Howard in his movie American Graffiti; the film’s success led ABC to reconsider the idea for the show in 1973.Garry Marshall, who wrote the original pilot, also co-wrote the first episode of the new series. Marshall enlisted the help of two other writers to bring that episode to life: Phil Mishkin and Marshall’s brother-in-law at the time, Rob Reiner. Reiner was still acting in All in the Family at the time and would only write that one script as a favor. At the time, he was married to Garry’s sister, Penny Marshall, who would go on to play Laverne DeFazio on Happy Days and its spinoff series, Laverne & Shirley, which ran from 1976 to 1983.That wouldn’t be the only connection the Reiner family would have to Happy Days and its spinoffs. Jerry Paris, who directed most of the episodes of Happy Days, also appeared on and directed many episodes of Rob’s father Carl Reiner’s earlier series, The Dick Van Dyke Show. A quirky episode Carl wrote, called “It May Look Like a Walnut,” in which Dick Van Dyke’s character dreams about aliens, served as the inspiration for the Happy Days episode that introduced Robin Williams as Mork from Ork. The Mork character also got his own spinoff, Mork & Mindy, that ran for four seasons between 1978 and 1982.The post Rob Reiner Helped Write the First Episode of ‘Happy Days’ appeared first on VICE.