The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family  was created for television by  Bernard Slade , and the series' executive producer was Bob Claver. The show was inspired by and loosely based on  the Cowsills , a family pop music group that was famous in the late 1960s. In the show's early development, the Cowsill children were considered by the producers, but because the Cowsills were not trained actors and were too old for the roles as scripted, Slade and Claver abandoned that idea. Shirley Jones had already been signed as mother Shirley Partridge and star of the show. Insistence that Jones's casting in the role of Mrs. Partridge was not negotiable. The  pilot  was filmed in December 1969. This unaired pilot differs from the pilot that was broadcast in 1970. In the unaired pilot, Shirley's name is Connie and she has a boyfriend played by Jones's real-life husband at the time,  Jack Cassidy , father of David Cassidy. Laurie mentions her late father once getting drunk at a Christmas party. The family has a different address and lives in Ohio. The show proved popular, but the fame took its toll on several, if not most, of the starring cast, particularly David Cassidy. In the midst of his rise to fame, Cassidy soon felt stifled by the show and trapped by the mass hysteria surrounding his every move. In May 1972, he appeared nude on the cover of  Rolling Stone  magazine in a cropped  Annie Leibovitz  photo. He used the article to get away from his squeaky clean image.The article mentioned that Cassidy was riding around New York in the back of a car " stoned  and drunk." Shortly after the series ended, scriptwriter Roberta Tatum launched a lawsuit against  Screen Gems  concerning the creation of the show. Tatum claimed that she had submitted a similar premise to Screen Gems prior to 1970 called  Baker's Half-Dozen . The matter was resolved out of court, with Tatum receiving a reported $150,000 from Screen Gems