|
Each year the networks manage to come up with at least one new series that we find especially irritating - more for what the show doesn't do rather than for what it does do.
. . .
This season it's The Partridge Family, which took its idea from the singing Cowsills family but doesn't seem prepared to go anywhere with it.
Shirley Jones plays the widowed mother of five youngsters - several of whom were selected, it seems, because they look like young Cowsills - who get together one day to make a demonstration record. A girl from the neighborhood who was supposed to sing can't make it, so the kids "draft" Mom and just like that they're an overnight smash sensation.
Thatss irritation spot number one, the continuation of the myth of instant success - whatever the field. The Cowsills singing group went through years of near-starvation and mortgage foreclosures before they made it.
The second irritation: the producers just had to make Mom Partridge a widow. Why? Dave Madden, formerly of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, plays Partridge family's agent. Why couldn't he have been the husband and father? After all, if you're going to swipe from the Cowsills, why not go all the way? Dad Cowsill is that group's business manager.
. . .
|
