Love, American Style

Love, American Style is an hour-long television anthology which was produced by Paramount Television and originally aired between September 1969 (see 1969 in television) and January 1974. For the 1971 and 1972 seasons it was a part of an ABC Friday prime-time lineup that also included The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Room 222, and The Odd Couple.

Happy Days

Garry Marshall was known to enjoy saying that Love, American Style was where failed sitcom pilots went to die, a remark to which there was much truth. Frequently, if a TV producer could not interest a network in a sitcom pilot, the producer would sell the unused script to Spelling, who would use the funniest bits of the pilot as a segment on Love, American Style.

In 1971, Garry Marshall came up with a concept for a sitcom about teenagers growing up in the 1950s, and shot a pilot which he titled New Family In Town, starring Ron Howard (as Richie), Marion Ross (as Richie's mother), and Anson Williams (as Potsie, Richie's friend), Harold Gould (as Howard, Richie's father), Susan Neher (Joanie, Richie's sister), and Ric Carrott (Chuck, Richie's brother).

Marshall tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the sitcom to all three networks. At last, he sold the pilot to Spelling, who aired the show in February 1972 as "Love and the Happy Days".

Shortly afterward, the movie American Graffiti and the Broadway musical Grease led to a wave of 1950s nostalgia, and ABC executives decided to buy Marshall's pilot – Happy Days, which became a huge hit and ran for eleven years. Gould, Neher, and Carrott were all replaced when the series launched.

Another pilot aired on Love, American Style that led to a series was Hanna-Barbera's Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. Paramount declined to be involved in that series, but would later team up with Hanna-Barbera to produce several animated spin-offs of the Happy Days franchise.

Format

Each week, the show featured different stories of romance, usually with a comedic spin. All episodes were unrelated, featuring different characters, stories and locations. The show often featured the same actors playing different characters in many episodes. In addition a large and ornate brass bed was a recurring prop in many episodes. Charles Fox's delicate yet hip music score, featuring flutes, harp, and flugelhorn set to a contemporary pop beat, provided the "love" ambiance which tied the stories together as a multifaceted romantic comedy each week.

For its first season, the theme song was performed by The Cowsills. Starting in the second season, the same theme song was sung by John Bahler, Tom Bahler, and Ron Hicklin, (billed as "The Charles Fox Singers"), and was carried on for the remainder of the series, as well as most episodes in syndication.

In many ways, the show initiated the "mini comedic soap opera" form used and "perfected" later on by Aaron Spelling for The Love Boat. While it lacked the connective threads that The Love Boat used, it generally told the same sort of "cotton candy" light emotional stories about underlying aspects of love, romance, and human relationships.

The title is loosely derived from a 1961 Italian comedy film called Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce, Italian Style), which won Academy Award nominations in 1962 for Best Director for Pietro Germi and for Best Actor for star Marcello Mastroianni. The film was later spoofed in 1967 by Divorce, American Style, starring Dick Van Dyke. The snowclone "(xxx), (nationality) Style" became a minor cultural meme as the sixties progressed.

The original series was also known for its 10–20 second drop-in silent movie style "joke clips" between the featured segments. This regular troupe featured future Rockford Files cast member Stuart Margolin, future Vega$ leading lady Phyllis Davis, and a young character actor, James Hampton (F Troop, The Longest Yard). These clips allowed the show to be padded to the required length without padding the main segments. They generally consisted of then-risque, burlesque-style comedy of manners visual jokes.

The show subsequently became a daytime standard in syndication, since it was readily edited down to a half-hour by the proper interweaving of the clips with a main segment, allowing for heavy stripping. By this technique five years of shows became effectively ten as far as stripping went.