“Happy Days” and “The Odd Couple” creator Garry Marshall will receive the Writers Guild of America, West’s 2014 Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing, which honors lifetime achievement in oustanding television.
The award will be given at the Writers Guild Awards’ West Coast ceremony, which takes place Feb. 1 at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live.
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WGAW president Christopher Keyser praised Marshall’s ability to chronicle friendships through his writing while announcing the honor.
“Garry Marshall‘s filmography – from ‘The Joey Bishop Show’ to ‘Happy Days’ – is a virtual history of American television comedy. Both of-their-time and timeless, his shows are a gentle, generous, comic mirror held up to late mid-century America,” Keyser said. “And no one is a finer or funnier chronicler of friendship – male or female (or alien) – than Garry Marshall. Beloved both for his iconic work and the warmth of his spirit, today we rightly place him on the short list of the best of our best.”
A five-time WGA nominee, Marshall won a Writers Guild Award in 1967 for co-writing the “Road to Lebanon” episode of “The Danny Thomas Special.”