Well, I’m in a super Las Vegas kinda place at the moment, and I know why. The third season of Hacks is out, and I just posted on Pete Barbutti, who still performs regular shows there, and we re-watched Showgirls a couple of months ago, as we periodically do, as it continues to yield so many unintended rewards. And today being the birthday of the late Nancy Walker, the natural outcome is that I should do a post on the Vegas-themed sitcom she starred in, Blansky’s Beauties (1977).
The premise of Blansky’s Beauties was that Walker ran the boarding house where a troupe of Vegas showgirls resided, AND directed the shows they starred in. With just a little nudge, you could turn that into a Polly Adler/ Nevada sex ranch kinda thing, but television wasn’t quite ready for that back then. I am though! (picks up phone) “Hello, Netflix?”
The show was one of the few 13-week wonders to come out of the butthole of Garry Marshall, and forgive me, it really does seem like he pooped this one out. Technically, it was a spin-off of Happy Days, but not really. A proper spin-off is when a character on a show becomes so popular they rate their own brand new program. Instead, Nancy Walker showed up in a single Happy Days episode as Howard Cunningham’s (Tom Bosley) cousin Nancy Blansky two weeks before Blansky’s Beauties premiered. Mysteriously Blansky’s Beauties took place in the present day, two decades after Happy Days is set, but Nancy is still the same age. Wait! It gets stupider! Eddie Mekka, Carmine on Happy Days spin-off Laverne and Shirley, is also a regular on the show — as Carmine’s cousin! And the Happy Days character Arnold, played by Pat Morita, is also a regular! And Happy Days character Pinky Tuscadero (Roz Kelly) is in the premiere episode! And one of the characters even says “Put a sock in it!” Even when I was 12, as I was at the time, I would have blown the whistle on this bullshit. Like, this show Jumped the Shark before it even premiered! It also Jumped the Shark before Fonzie jumped the shark! By several months!
So there’s a kind of arrogance to whatever strategizing went into the formulaic formulizing of this show. It’s like the writers didn’t trust the audience enough to make the concept stand up on its own. A sit-com about Vegas showgirls? Sure, sign me up! In principle. But they didn’t trust it, so they pegged it to Happy Days.
Casting the popular Walker also probably seemed like a strong move. As we wrote in an earlier post, Walker was a regular on two hit shows (Rhoda and McMillan & Wife) simultaneously and the spokesperson for Bounty Paper Towels, all at the same time. Although…that could also have meant that she was overexposed. The lead show girl character was played by the gorgeous Caren Kaye, who was ubiquitous on ’70s television, and was also in films such as The Lords of Flatbush. Which was…again…one of the inspirations for Happy Days. Tall, Southern Rhonda Bates of Keep on Truckin’ and CPO Sharkey was the requisite dumb-dumb character. And there were two other actors in the cast you might know, young proto-Fascist Scott Baio and Lynda Goodfriend, both of whom found employment on Happy Days (as Chachi and Lori-Beth respectively) after Blansky’s Beauties tanked.
For tank it did. For some of the reasons we’ve mentioned, but also because it was up against Emergency! and The Jeffersons on the other two networks. I’m sure that I was watching the latter, as I had outgrown the former (though I had been very much devoted to it a couple of years earlier, when I was…ya know, still playing with fire trucks). And I don’t remember a damn thing about Blansky’s Beauties. Although it has a very nice theme song.
Anyway, Marshall was not ready to give up on this concept completely. The following year, he gathered together Kaye, Goodfriend and Baio for a new sit-com about Las Vegas showgirls with a wisecracking kid sidekick called Who’s Watching the Kids? That one lasted 15 episodes. But the concept is not ahead of its time any more. Someone should try it again!
(Travalanche) 
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