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.
