The Partridge Family

Recently I've had the pleasure of watching re-runs of this quite pleasant television show. While it never dealt in-depth with earth shattering issues, it was well performed, well crafted & had some great songs that showcased the era. Some may find it sappy & over indulgent, but take it for what it was, a light comedy for teenage viewers. Also the show did pick up three 'Golden Globe' nominations, so some in the industry must have been of the same opinion!

Many people love to dismiss "The Partridge Family" very quickly for some reason, while the truth is this is a pretty decent show which featured some great music during its run.

Of course, David Cassidy is the star, very good looking and talented with a great voice and lovable screen presence. The rest of the cast is also strong for the most part. Shirley Jones plays a great and caring mom, Susan Day is good as Laurie, and of course Danny Bonaduce is fantastic as the money-hungry Danny. The Ruben dude is good as is the second Chris, but the Tracy girl really is kind of stiff.

The stories were a lot of fun, especially the ones that revolved around their performing somewhere. How cool was it that they performed on TOP of the bus that one time? The show was innocent and showed good morals in the stories.

The show has a lot of future stars appearing, among my favorites are Mark Hamill, Rob Reiner (GREAT as "Snake," remember that funky music every time he appeared on screen?) and Tony Geary, who would later find megafame as Luke Spencer ("Luke and Laura") of General Hospital.

The bus was great. I always wondered who did the "roadie" work? Did David carry all the equipment? And if the band had all these big hits, how come every gig was seemingly at a dinner theater in front of 60 people? But that's just some of the fun stuff to think about.

The kids actually got pretty good at faking the playing, even the second Chris doing the drums like the record often.

Now, the music. This is not "The Brady Bunch" here. These songs are great songs, and there's a lot of them. Forget the TV show for a minute, just concentrating on the music. Those first four albums especially are incredible, with the album "Sound Magazine" from 1972 probably being one of the greatest pop music albums ever made. That album contains gem after gem, classic after classic, and is nothing less than a pop music masterpiece, perfect from start to finish.

My personal Partridge Family song is "I Would Have Loved You Anyway," written by Tony Romeo, who wrote most of the band's greatest songs (including "I Think I Love You"). I spoke to Tony Romeo once a long time ago and it was a blast, he was telling me how he and others in the studio would have to teach David Cassidy the songs right on the spot because David had such an incredible touring schedule on days he wasn't filming.

"Summer Days," "Rainmaker," Together We're Better," "Hello Hello," "I'll Meet You Halfway," "Brand New Me," "One Night Stand," the list of great songs just goes on and on.

This is a show that REALLY needs to be on DVD. And when it does, I really hope the disks have a feature where they can play the "music videos" only, and the set gets to at least the third season so we can have those music sequences on disk.

This show was a pop culture phenomenon that actually had its moments of creative inspiration. The relationship among the members of the cast, particularly during the first season, was wonderful. The writing always had some good moments and the performances of all the actors were great. Especially Danny Bonaduce as Danny and David Madden as the agent Mr. Kincaid. The show became a pop culture icon because it was new fresh and innovative for the time.

Amusing to see VH-1 staging a minor-scale "American Idol" to find the "new Partridge Family" (with judges who base their scores on, among other things, physical likeness to the original line-up). It's nice see Shirley Jones and David Cassidy involved (as for Danny Bonaduce, well...he'd appear at the opening of an envelope). But the really funny part is the fact that VH-1 does not air reruns of "The Partridge Family', so how do these young kids auditioning even know who Keith Partridge is (and what he meant to TV viewers and teenyboppers all over the world from 1970-1974). It's bound to flop, as did the remake of "Family Affair", simply because you can't get lightning to strike twice. "The Partridge Family" came along at the right time, when people needed it--needed to BELIEVE IN IT--and record producer Wes Ferrell and the editors at 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat made millions off the show (exploiting David Cassidy's manufactured wholesome image of the boy-singer-next-door). There were better shows of this period (and the laugh-track just screams at the sometimes corny humor), but the show does have great appeal, and the familial relationships have a lived-in feel (when Laurie and Danny kid Keith about his non-existent bald spot, they wink at each other as Keith goes mad with the hairbrush, and mom Shirley watches from the sidelines, no doubt enjoying the prank). They have tried unsuccessfully to reunite this group of actors for specials, and aside from a David-Danny-Shirley reunion on "Arsenio", they've failed. If you can't reunite the originals, why then is VH-1 betting on the success of duplicates? Maybe people need to believe again, or maybe Hollywood has really run dry of ideas.

I was 5 years old when this show debuted, and can remember the popularity of it unlike any other show to date. The bubble gum cards, the records, teen magazines-everything to do with "The Partridge Family" was a hot commodity! "I Think I Love You" was the first song I ever knew all the lyrics to. This was due to my friends and I piling onto the swingset in my backyard, which included a 4 seater lawn swing which we made fit 8 kids, and sing "I Think I Love You" over and over again while pumping the lawn swing way into the air. Some of my friends would take the end cones off and sing through the top bar to get a reverb effect! Seeing the show in reruns throughout the '70s & '80s, it still had it's charm. It wasn't mean't to be an emmy award winner, but it served it's purpose-to be lighthearted and funny. The music showcased on the show was memorable too. Try watching an episode, and not have their songs replay in your head long after watching it. To me, "The Partridge Family" will always have a special place in my heart because it invokes happy memories from such a great time in my life.