The Partridge Family

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The Partridge Family

From 1970 to 1974, a time when most kids swore by the adage "Don't trust anyone over thirty," ABC aired The Partridge Family, an extremely popular sitcom featuring a mom who went on tour with her kids in a band. The hit show was loosely based on the late 1960s folk-music family, the Cowsills.

The Partridge Family (one of two 1970s sitcoms about a big family and a perky blond mom; The Brady Bunch was the other) starred Oscar winner and musical theater staple Shirley Jones as Shirley Partridge, the widowed matriarch whose kids started jamming in an impromptu session in the garage of their suburban California home. They asked her to join them, and it sounded groovy. They recorded the song "I Think I Love You," and to everyone's surprise, a record company bought it, it became a smash hit, and a band was born.

And what's a family band without a manager and reluctant father-figure? Enter fast-talking, child-hating, stewardess-dating Reuben Kinkaid (Dave Madden), perpetual foil for ten-year-old con artist, Danny (Danny Bonaduce). The rest of the family included Suzanne Crough as 5-year-old Tracy, Jeremy Gelbwaks (1970-71) and then Brian Forster (1971-74) as 7-year-old Chris, Susan Dey as 15-year-old Laurie, and Jones' stepson, David Cassidy, as 17-year-old Keith.

The Partridge Family toured around the country in a psychedelically-painted school bus (with the astoundingly unhip "Careful, Nervous Mother Driving" on the back) and the show focused on their exploits on the road, and in their California hometown, and their attempt to have normal family lives and be pop stars at the same time. Every show wrapped up in time for a song, during which the Partridges were usually wearing matching burgundy velvet pantsuits with white ruffled shirts.

Like the Monkees before them, the Partridge Family TV band was heavily cross-promoted in the music business, and "I Think I Love You" sold 4 million copies. Unlike the Monkees, they had no musical pretensions as a band. None of them were professional musicians, and Cassidy and Jones were the only ones providing actual vocals in recordings and on the show. It didn't take a musical genius to figure out that if Cassidy was the lead male vocalist, pre-teen Bonaduce was (impossibly) singing the baritone harmony parts.

The Partridge Family made a huge teen idol out of the androgynous Cassidy, who toured solo to throngs of screaming adolescent girls. His fans were so rabid that one actually asked for one of the gallstones he'd passed as a keepsake. After failing at solo television, he found he was a powerful draw in Las Vegas in the 1990s.

Despite his heartthrob status, Cassidy actually didn't carry the show. That responsibility fell to impish, red-headed, smart-alec Bonaduce. The precocious Bonaduce had the comic timing of an old master. Unfortunately, as he got older and was told he wasn't cute anymore, he went the way of many a child actor—into a drug haze, punctuated with appearances on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. His antics included an arrest in 1990 in Daytona Beach, Florida, for attempting to buy cocaine; a year later he was charged with assaulting a transvestite prostitute in Phoenix. He spent the rest of the 1990s as a disc jockey.

The saga of a slightly-hipper-than-Mrs.-Cleaver-mom and family couldn't hold up; ratings of the Partridge Family started to sag in 1973, when it was moved from Friday night to Saturday night, up against All in the Family and Emergency. The 1974-75 season included an ABC Saturday morning cartoon version called the Partridge Family 2200 AD which, for some reason, put the family in space. Dey, Bonaduce, Forster, Crough, and Madden provided their voices.

Young viewers in the early 1970s inexplicably felt the need to "choose" between The Brady Bunch (which some saw as even more implausible) and The Partridge Family. In the end, both shows were representative of the happy, mindless nature of many 1970s sitcoms.

—Karen Lurie