Ron Howard’s Daughter Hasn’t Gotten Around to Watching ‘Happy Days’
The one where Richie Cunningham almost dies?
Nope, nope and nope — Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of sitcom legend Ron Howard, hasn’t seen a single classic episode of her dad’s long-running television comedy, Happy Days.
On Watch What Happens Live this week, Andy Cohen couldn’t believe Bryce “still hadn’t gotten around” to catching her dad’s beloved sitcom. “I know,” she itted. “It’s so rude.” But hey, she rationalized, her kids don’t really watch her stuff either.
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It’s not the first (or second) time Howard has been called out on her negligence. When she made her first appearance on The View in 2004, per People, she conceded that she’d never seen Happy Days, despite Henry “The Fonz” Winkler being her godfather. On a subsequent View visit in 2022 — nearly 20 years later — she told the that she still hadn’t found the time to check it out.
“It's not like I avoided it,” she told Joy Behar, although that’s precisely what it’s like. By 2022, she was completely out of excuses, especially since Jay Leno heard she hadn’t seen the show and sent her the complete collection of Happy Days DVDs in 2004. “He was like, ‘Get with it. Here’s a box set of Happy Days.’ And I was like, ‘Thank you so much!’ But I didn’t really fully… I haven't,” Howard confessed.
Is this Bryce’s subliminal payback for Ron’s substandard parenting? That doesn’t appear to be the case — she speaks highly of Pop when given the chance. Sure, she’s a nepo baby, but she told The Daily Beast in 2020 that “there was no greater privilege than the fact that my dad was ive of me, empowered me, and showed me respect, real respect from day one.”
Since Ron turned away from acting for an award-winning career as a director, Bryce was "sooooo nervous for him” when he recently played an exaggerated, angry version of himself on Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ series, The Studio, according to Entertainment Weekly. “He's done some stuff in Arrested Development, he's done some cameos here and there, but (this was) a real part — with, like, dialogue — and they are shooting it all with ‘oners,’ you cannot mess up!”
But she needn’t have worried. She told Cohen this week that Ron killed it in his big tantrum scene with Rogen. “He was just fantastic,” she gushed. “He’s a really, really, really good actor.”
“If I’d seen Happy Days,” she acknowledged, “maybe I’d know that.”
