Thanks to Emily for this cap!

Laverne and Shirley was a situation comedy and a spin-off of Happy Days which began airing on January 1, 1976.

The characters of Laverne DeFazio and Shirley Feeney spun off from an episode of Happy Days. The early Happy Days incarnation of the girls showed them as "easy", rough-and-tumble bimbos; Shirley sported a Bronx accent and both were obviously a little more than friends with the Fonz. Fonzie recruited Shirley as a date with the promise that she would go al the way. They appeared briefly in four more episodes before they re-appeared in their spin-off as two different characters alltogether.

In their spin-off, Laverne DeFazio was a streetwise Brooklyn transplant, best friends with the virginal Milwaukee native Shirley Feeney since their early childhood (they were kicked out of the Brownies together). After graduating from Filmore High School in 1956, they moved into a basement appartment at Knapp Street and began working as bottlecappers for the Shotz Brewery. When we first meet them, it's around 1958.

Laverne and Shirley were diometric oposites of one another - Laverne grasping the venial pleasures of the here and now, Shirley holding out in the hope of finding her Mister Right.

In the wings - perhaps holding the ropes on the sandbags a little too loosely - were Leonard "Lenny" Kosnowski and Andrew "Squiggy" Squiggman. Adnoidal, dim-witted, and yet friendly and supportive, the two boys have known the girls since they were kids as well - and have been stalking them for dates ever since. During Season One, the boys move into the girls' building (originally listed as being on Hampton Street), and convince their psychic landlay Mrs. Havenwurst to let them take up a lease. That the boys also work for Shotz as truckers makes things a little sticky, as no matter how hard the girls try to shake them, the boys are always there - two steps behind or two in front - and, much to their dismay, the girls often need them more than they'd like to let on.

An extra source of financial support is Frank DeFazio, Laverne's widowed father and owner of The Pizza Bowl, a basement-level pizza resteraunt/bowling alley a few blocks from their appartment. Laverne often works herself to distraction trying to convince her father she can stand on her own two feet.

Evidence that they can make it on their own lies in their oft-married and divorced landlady, Edna Babbish. A talented singer, Edna is both practical and earthy. And never short on good advice.

"Advice" being what Shirley needs in regard to her off-and-on again boyfriend, Carmine "The Big Ragoo" Ragusa, with whom she has an off-and-on again relationship.

In the first episode of the 1979-80 season (#6) "Not Quite New York" (a bit of a dig at the original idea of moving the series to New York), Laverne, Shirley, Lenny, Squiggy, Carmine, Edna and Mister DeFazio all uprooted themselves and moved to Burbank, California. Frank sold the Pizza Bowl and bought a franchise of the Western chain "Cowboy Bills", in which Edna had a share. Laverne and Shirley were laid off from Shotz - with no better offers, they manipulated Lenny and Squiggy to drive them out to Los Angeles on their vacation, where they would begin anew.

Lenny and Squiggy end up liking LA so much that they stick around - taking an appartment adjacent to the girls. Carmine follows them because of his love for Shirley. The girls became giftwrappers at the Bardwells department store, and Lenny and Squiggy opened up their own talent agency, Squignowski Talent Agency of Burbank (STAB!).

In LA, a boyfriend is introduced for Laverne - Sonny Saint Jacques, a stuntmant - and Rhonda Lee, a blonde actress in the Jayne Mansfield vein.

The show carried on this way until the eighth season, during which Shirley marries Army doctor Walter Meaney and becomes pregnant. Further backstage blow-ups led to Cindy Williams suing ABC to get out of her contract - Shirley was written off as having left with Walter to go overseas.

For the remainder of season 8, Laverne becomes a tester at an aerospace plant, her co-worker Chuck (a Star Trek enthusiast played by Charles "Roger Rabbit" Fleishman) is introduced, and a myriad of guest-stars came in to fix the "Shirley void". The void only got deeper when Michael McKean missed most of the season to film "This is Spinal Tap". When Betty Garret left the show the same season, the final episodes of the show centered on three orginal characters: Laverne, Squiggy and Carmine. With two more failed attempts at spin-offs launched (one featuring the Chuck character as a manager of a Rock band, the other featuring Carmine as a struggling featured player on the Broadway stage in New York), LAS was canceled in the spring of 1983, and we canonically leave the characters in approximately the year 1967.

Acording to canon from a brief reunion sketch during the reunion special "Laverne and Shirley: Together Again", the girls moved back in with one another and back to Milwaukee after Shirley divorced Walter and Laverne married four times. Lenny and Squiggy still work in Hollywood - with the reality game show "Island of Doom", licking people in Hole Number 2.