Love, American Style

Did You Know?

• The show's title is loosely derived from the 1961 Italian comedy film Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce, Italian Style), which received Academy Award nominations in 1962 for Best Director and Best Actor.
• The segment 'Love and the Television Set' (aired February 25, 1972) served as the de facto pilot for the 1974 series Happy Days, and was originally produced as a pilot for New Family in Town.
• The animated segment 'Love and the Old-Fashioned Father' (aired February 11, 1972) became the pilot for the Hanna-Barbera syndicated series Wait Till Your Father Gets Home.
• The series received two Emmy nominations for Best Comedy Series, for the 1969–70 and 1970–71 seasons.

History

Each installment of the show presented several independent romantic stories, typically played for laughs, with rotating casts, settings, and plots. The same performers frequently returned as different characters across multiple episodes, and a large, ornate brass bed appeared again and again as a set piece. A musical score by Charles Fox, blending flutes, harp, and flugelhorn over a contemporary pop rhythm, supplied the romantic mood that unified the weekly anthology.

The Cowsills sang the theme for the first season; from season two onward, the Ron Hicklin Singers—who also provided vocals for the Partridge Family and included brothers John and Tom Bahler, credited as the Charles Fox Singers—performed the same tune. That second version stayed for the rest of the series and for most syndicated broadcasts. The program’s title took loose inspiration from the 1961 Italian comedy Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce, Italian Style), which earned Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Actor.

That film was parodied in 1967 by Divorce, American Style, starring Dick Van Dyke, and the pattern “(something), (nationality) Style” became a modest cultural phrase as the decade went on. The original series also featured brief blackout sketches lasting 10 to 20 seconds between main segments. A regular troupe—including Stuart Margolin, Phyllis Davis, and James Hampton—performed these risqué, burlesque-style visual gags, which helped fill the show to its required runtime.

For its first four years on ABC, Love, American Style drew a solid audience and earned fair ratings, though it never cracked the top 30 in the Nielsen rankings. Some of its segments acted as pilots for potential TV series; most never progressed beyond that stage, but two did lead to full shows.

New versions

A decade after the show left the air, a new version titled New Love, American Style aired on ABC's daytime schedule from December 23, 1985, to August 15, 1986, featuring an updated theme performed by Lou Rawls. It was canceled after eight months due to low ratings against The Price Is Right on CBS. A third edition, starring Melissa Joan Hart and Mariska Hargitay among others, was shot as a pilot for the 1998–1999 television season but was not ordered as a series; ABC aired the pilot on February 20, 1999.