In the early 1970s, The Partridge Family made David Cassidy a star. The actor played Keith Partridge in the ABC sitcom from 1970 to 1974 and also launched a solo music career thanks to the success of the show.
But the grind of the weekly TV series and touring took its toll on the ‘70s teen idol, and by the start of Season 4, Cassidy was already looking to leave and opted not to renew his contract.
Cassidy, who died in 2017 at age 67, once told the Deseret News that he began to find the show “artistically frustrating on a lot of levels” as he approached his mid-20s while playing a teen boy.
“I was singing songs that were focused for a 7- to 15-year-old, 16-year-old audience,” he shared. “I was walking in going, ‘Hi, Mom. Can I borrow the keys to the bus?’ That’s tough to find real depth in that. I wanted to do better work. I wanted to do different work. I wanted to do more serious work. And I fancied myself, at that time, as someone who was capable of doing a lot more than the audience or the world had ever seen.”
RELATED: David Cassidy Hated This Hit 1971 Partridge Family Song
An October 1973 “Hollywood Hotline” blurb in The Lima News, published just one month after the fourth season of The Partridge Family began, teased that producers had already auditioned “hundreds of young fellows as a replacement for bubblegum idol David Cassidy” ahead of the star’s exit.
“But so far we haven’t come up with a winner,” producer Mel Swope said. “He won’t be exactly a family replacement for David. We’ll have David away at college next season, and we’ll need another singer for the group.”
During the final months of The Partridge Family, viewers saw a lot of new faces as producers tried to put a new spin on the show.
In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Cassidy said the new characters were brought in in an attempt to save the hit show, but it had the opposite effect.
“Had I not planned on leaving The Partridge Family the following year — they kept trying to find these new acts to replace me with that were scary, as if they sought out the people with the least amount of talent, incredibly bad instinct,” he recalled in 1998. “The kid next door, the twins, the nephew of Reuben Kincaid… they tried a number of things. There was this comedian who was really not funny. Still not funny.“
Cassidy added that The Partridge Family ultimately “died a death” when it was moved to a Saturday night time slot “when young people go out usually.”
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The characters Cassidy referred to were Alan Kincaid, the nephew of the Partridge family manager Reuben (Dave Madden) who was a rising comedian played by Alan Bursky; singing twin brothers Andy and David Williams (the nephews of music legend Andy Williams), who guest starred in a Season 4 episode; and Ricky Segall, an adorable musical moppet who moved next door to the Partridges—and sometimes took the stage at their shows.
Producers never found their new Keith. Not only did The Partridge Family move to Saturday nights, but it was up against the No. 1 CBS sitcom, All in the Family, which killed its ratings.
In an interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Cassidy’s co-star and real-life stepmother Shirley Jones said, “Our show was out of style, and we wouldn’t be able to compete with a show like All In The Family. … I think David, at this point in time, had had it on the show. He wanted to do a different kind of music than just The Partridge Family kind of music. And I think they made the decision [to cancel the show] with those two things in mind.”
Related: 56 Years Ago Today, David Cassidy Was on the Verge of a No. 1 Hit—But He Didn’t Sing in ‘The Partridge Family’ Premiere
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