Written by Musgo Del Jefe
Although the air dates for Love American Style - Season 1, Volume 1 run from September 29, 1969 to December 22, 1969, this show is pure early Seventies. It's certainly our memory of the early Seventies, looking back almost 40 years later. The bright colors, the hip, quick cuts, the corny jokes and the quirky Herb Alpert-ish score. But 38 years later, what this really represents is an important transition to the core ABC shows that would dominate the ratings for the better part of the Seventies and early Eighties.
Love American Style represents a genre that really doesn't exist anymore - the anthology show and more specifically the comedic anthology show. The formula is basic but really it's brilliant. The hour-long shows consist of anywhere from two to four stories. These separate stories are surround by short filler gags heavily influenced by Laugh-In. These "short attention span" gags were unrelated to each other and usually starred a core group of actors, "The Love American Style Players." The theme song is sung by The Cowsills (best known for Hair) and it's catchy happiness along with the fireworks and red, white and blue heart tell the viewer that this is going to be a light-hearted party. The flexibility of this formula was perfect for syndication (where I first encountered the show at Noon-time just before The Hollywood Squares in the late Seventies). The filler jokes allowed the shows to be edited to 30 minutes by filling out the 20-minute stories.
Because the only criteria for this show is to be about "love", there's a variety of stories that can be adapted for the show. One is the extended joke. In "Love and the Hustler," Flip Wilson plays Red, a Muhammad Ali of the pool-hustling world. The extended skit has Red boasting about his skills until the final reveal when the hustler gets hustled. Only the final line of the piece brings the piece back to a "love" theme. Same for "Love and the Pill" where two parents are first concerned that their daughter may be having sex with her boyfriend and then concerned that something might be wrong because she isn't. These single-scene pieces are cheap to film, usually taking place all in one location and in one time period, like a Saturday Night Live skit.
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