Partridge Family Soul Club

I've been catching up with my old friends The Partridge Family this weekend. They released season one on DVD a couple of weeks back and it has some fine moments. Unlike The Brady Bunch, which has been rerun to a point where I can almost recite some episodes word-for-word, shotgunning 25 Partridge episodes back-to-back is a voyage of rediscovery.

I think my favorite episode is "Soul Club," in which the Partridges accidentally get booked in place of the Temptations at a struggling Detroit club run by Richard Pryor and a pre-bald Lou Gossett, Jr. Pryor and Gossett have been running the club as a "community center" for "the people," but a loan shark is trying to take it away from them. The Partridges volunteer to help them save the club, with Keith contributing a new song he describes as "kind of an Afro thing" and Danny enlisting a local black militant group to stand up to the loan shark and provide orchestration for Keith's song.

Most of the show's funniest scenes involve Danny Bonaduce and/or Dave Madden, who played Rueben Kincaid, the family's hypertense manager. As Bonaduce says of Madden on the commentary track, "Every muscle in that man's face acts!" Madden was also really good in the recurring role of Earl, a Mel's Diner regular on Alice.