You can rest your head on my shoulder.
Out by the dawn's early light, my love
I will defend your right to try."
Love, American Style was a comedy anthology show that aired for five seasons (1969–74) on ABC, which presented various skits relating to romance, sex, or people's love lives.
The general format opened with a short (30-second) skit where (usually) a guy would try something and end up becoming the butt of a joke, like trying to make out with a girl and then discovering it's a guy, or the woman is willing but her husband is lying asleep in the same bed. (Oh, don't worry about it, he's so drunk he'll never notice.) There would then be a much longer skit, running anywhere from 10 minutes to the rest of the show. It would be followed by another 30-second short, then if time remained, another longer skit. This format was not always followed, however; a number of episodes were Poorly Disguised Pilots that subsequently became regular series, such as Happy Days and Wait Till Your Father Gets Home.
Tropes, Television Style:
- Adam Westing: Thirty years before Family Guy, Adam West plays himself in "Love and the Great Catch".
- American Title
- And the Adventure Continues: Some commercial breaks start with the title heart reading "More Love To Come".
- Animated Adaptation: Luvcast USA, produced by De Patie Freleng Enterprises for The ABC Saturday Superstar Movies.
- As Herself: Jacqueline Susann in "Love and the Hidden Meaning"
- As Himself: Adam West in "Love and the Great Catch".
- Back to Front: "Love and the Perfect Woman".
- Christmas Episode: "Love and the Christmas Punch" has hapless Henry Gibson attempting to deliver flowers at a drunken Christmas party and winding up in his Goofy Print Underwear.
- Eagleland: In a few segments, mainly ones set in The South or California. Also in the title; after all, it's not Love, Canadian Style.
- Eskimo Land: How a man (Bill Bixby) describes his trip to Alaska, worried about the Eskimo tradition of sharing everything...including wives... in "Love and the Eskimo."
- Formula-Breaking Episode: Two installments were Hanna-Barbera animated pieces: Love and the Private Eye (Richard Dawson voiced Melvin Danger, a detective who fancies himself a ladies' man), and Love and the Old-Fashioned Father (which would beget the syndicated series Wait Till Your Father Gets Home).
- Framed Face Opening: Several examples, such as this set of opening credits
. - Greasy Spoon: Setting for "Love and the Blue Plate Special."
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every skit has a title like "Love and the ______" or "Love in the _____". In The Remake, there were exceptions.
- Jumping Out of a Cake: The extra job in "Love and the Extra Job."
- Murphy's Bed: "Love and the Vertical Romance", in which a woman tries to cure her husband of his Absurd Phobia of beds.
- Pie in the Face: In the episode with Susan Howard.
- Poorly Disguised Pilot: As called out in the main text. Not quite as obvious as most invocations of this trope; the anthology format meant that the show was already visiting differing and unrelated sets of characters from one episode to the next.
- Pretty in Mink: "Love and the Fur Coat" was about a guy trying to get a fur coat for his girlfriend without his wife knowing about it. His wife gets it instead after a mix up.
- Promoted to Opening Credits: James Hampton (a featured player in the short skits) in one of the last episodes, "Love and the Image Makers".
- Psychic Powers: "Love and the See-Through Mind".
- Quitting to Get Married: In one sketch, a woman who is a professional cake jump-outer has a boyfriend who doesn't want her doing that any more, so he proposes. She quits on the spot, mere moments before she's scheduled to jump.
- The Remake: In 1985, ABC created a short-lived revival, The New Love American Style.
- Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: "Love and the Spendthrift".
- Scenery Censor: Used in the episode "Love and the Bashful Groom" with a wedding held in a nudist colony.
- Title Theme Tune: Performed by The Cowsills in the first season, and by the Ron Hicklin Singers (backing vocalists for The Partridge Family) from season 2 onwards."Truer than the red, white and blue-hoo-hoo-HOO!"
