How the TV show Ron Howard wanted to delete from history actually pushed him toward directing
In any Hollywood career, it’s impossible for an actor to predict what will happen with each job they take on. Sometimes, for instance, they may work a gig they hate, like Ron Howard did in the early 1970s, but it inadvertently provides the key to altering their career path forever.
Howard was 16 years old when he signed up to play a major role in a TV drama that pre-dated his seminal role as Richie Cunningham in Happy Days by three full years.
However, prior to agreeing to play Bob Smith, the teenage son of a Los Angeles detective, in ABC’s The Smith Family, Howard was already a veteran of the acting game. He first came to fame as a precocious child star in The Andy Griffith Show, after all, which ran for eight years and saw him credited as ‘Ronny’ Howard, and throughout the ‘60s, he had countless guest spots on other prominent shows.
The Smith Family, though, would be his first extended on-screen run as an adolescent, an important step for an actor trying to make the transition from child actor to teen star and eventually to adult roles. Excitingly, the show would also see Howard acting alongside Hollywood legend Henry Fonda, who played his character’s father, Detective Chad Smith. It was a big deal at the time for an A-list star like Fonda to do television, as many in the industry would have viewed it as beneath his talents, but he happily starred in two seasons of the show.
Even though The Smith Family provided Howard with a great opportunity to sit under Fonda’s learning tree, the show itself didn’t amount to much, and when it was cancelled, few people shed a tear. In fact, when Howard mentioned it to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2025, he wearily admitted, “I acted with Henry Fonda in a television series that nobody knows about, nor should they, because it was pretty bad.”
Despite wishing the show could be deleted from history, Howard did admit there was one thing about his Smith Family experience that was worth its weight in gold. Unsurprisingly, Fonda was heavily involved in this moment, which actually gave the young teenager the first push toward pursuing the future he truly desired in Hollywood.
As any cinephile worth their salt knows, Howard’s time as an actor came to an end after seven seasons of Happy Days, because he had begun to make headway as a director and wanted to fully concentrate on that aspect of the business. Without Fonda’s encouragement nearly a decade earlier, though, that may have never come to pass.
“He was really the first voice of the industry that encouraged me to be a filmmaker,” Howard remembered of Fonda’s sage advice on the set of The Smith Family. “He was looking at my short films and reading the little scripts that I’d written, and he said, ‘If you don’t take a big creative risk every year and a half or two, you’re not servicing your talent or the audience or the medium that you love.’”
Ultimately, hearing such positive reinforcement from a legend of the movie business was much more important to Howard than a starring role in a middling TV show people would soon forget anyway, and he made sure to carry Fonda’s sage advice forward into a directing career defined by classic movies like Splash, Apollo 13, and A Beautiful Mind.
