Love On the Air: 22 TV Shows that Spoke of “Love” (1950 to 1979)
Love on television — you can find it just about all the time. Love as a theme or plot line is ubiquitous throughout television’s long history; about the only program you can cite over the last 60 years where love was not evident during a show’s run was The McLaughlin Group.
In some instances, however, love was so important to the show that it actually appears in the title. Any program that actually declares it’s about “love” in the title card and in the TV Guide listing must, per force, be about the same thing everyone has on their mind every February 14th (and hopefully a few more times beyond that).
There were quite a few such programs on the air in the United States between 1950 and 1979. Like love itself, they came in many forms: some were deep and touching and lasted with us forever, others were brief flings that ended in the blink of an eye. In order of when they first came on the air:
I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951 to 1957)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juNSYH7RveY
One of the most influential television shows ever aired, the series literally set the standard for comedies that would follow it for years. The multi-camera production model pioneered by Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz, three cameras filming before a live studio audience, would be used on sitcoms as far apart in periods as The Burns and Allen Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Three’s Company, Cheers, and Everybody Loves Raymond. By shooting on film, the series could go into reruns almost immediately, and indeed has never been off the air, continually playing somewhere on some station since the 1950s.
What kept people watching from then until End of Days was a very simple premise: an ambitious if not necessary talented limelight seeker, the band leader she’s married to, and how the two of them love each other despite the zaniness she gets into. In fact, the series and its immediate follow-up (The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour) only ended when Ball filed for divorce in 1960. And like some folks, Lucy’s response to the end of her marriage was to throw herself into her work; after getting controlling ownership of the company responsible for the show, Desilu Productions, she went on to produce such shows as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.
Love of Life (CBS, 1951 to 1980)
Amazingly, if one does a cursory look at many of the soap operas — sorry, daytime dramas — produced for American television, out of over 100 series from the beginning of regular broadcasts until today, only four of them had “love” in the title. Love of Life, a story focused primarily around caring Vanessa Dale “and her search for human dignity” (as the opening narration would claim) and her “bad” sister Meg, depending on the decade the show aired, survived the longest. There were three Vanessas during the show’s run: Peggy McCay, Bonnie Bartlett, and Audrey Peters, the last of whom was introduced on air “peek-a-boo”-like when Vanessa got married on the show and is revealed when she removes her wedding veil at her ceremony. In addition to this role, other swapped out actors included a brief stint where Meg’s errant son Ben was played by Christopher Reeve.
First Love (NBC, 1954 to 1955)
By contrast, First Love did not have the strong fan base nor the confidence of the network suits to go 29 years. During the 18 months the show ran, we followed a couple through a difficult marriage and a murder trial, played by Val Dufour and Patricia Barry who would get better recognition decades later on other daytime dramas.
Gamble on Love (DuMont, 1954)
A game show on what would be America’s Forgotten Network (which gave us Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners), the two months this show was on the air would not have warranted notice had not the last of the two hosts for the show, Ernie Kovacs, made a brief stop here on his way to becoming a major influence on the medium.
Love Story (DuMont, 1954)
No, this isn’t what you’re thinking of; the film that shares this title wouldn’t be produced for another 16 years. And that’s about the only thing this very short-lived anthology series would share with anything; production values were supposedly so low that it may have contributed to the audience abandoning DuMont, leaving America with only three networks until Fox comes on the air in 1986.
For Love or Money (CBS, 1958 to 1959)
No, this has nothing to do with that reality show from 2003 with the same name; this game show hosted by original Johnny Carson sidekick Bill Nimmo involved contestants buzzing in answers to questions, who then had to choose between sticking with the value won or hoping the “dancing decimal machine” would allow them to increase their earnings; think of it as a precursor to Deal or No Deal.
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (CBS, 1959 to 1963)
It happens: you get introduced to someone, you’re expected to hit it off with this person, but someone else in the room catches your eye and captivates you. For the TV public, it was expected that star Dwayne Hickman as Gillis, having been the breakout star from The Bob Cummings Show/Love That Bob, would get the main attention; it just happened that his co-star, Bob Denver as beatnik Maynard G. Krebs, would walk away with all the attention. Such is the way of things, at times.
Love and Marriage (NBC, 1959 to 1961)
Before he was Uncle Charlie on My Three Sons, William Demarest was in this sitcom, playing the owner of a Tin Pan Alley music publishing house who hated rock ‘n’ roll, which probably meant lots of digs at the Brill Building. He shared his business with his daughter, who happened to live in the same apartment with him along with her husband, which shows that even then rents were so brutal in New York that the kids had to move back in with their spouses. (And yes, that song was the theme, the same theme that got used in that other, more successful sitcom years later.)
Love on a Rooftop (ABC, 1966 to 1967)
A young couple fall in love, get married, find a walk-up that’s got roof access, and start to live out their lives in a situation that sounds awfully close to Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (which ultimately got made into a TV series itself in 1970). Issues between the stubborn husband and the meddling father-in-law played out through the run, but love was not enough to keep those two on the roof, and soon the wife, Judy Carne, got off the San Francisco roof and found her way to beautiful downtown Burbank in Laugh-In.
You’re In Love, Charlie Brown (CBS, special first broadcast June 12, 1967)
One of the classic Peanuts specials, with Chuck trying (and failing miserably) to impress the Little Red-Haired Girl; the special is notable beyond its high quality and great appeal for being the first use in the Peanuts specials of the trombone to relay what the adults are saying.
Love Is A Many Splendored Thing (CBS, 1967 to 1973)
This daytime drama was originally a sequel to the 1955 film with a similar name; however, as would become de regur during the run, there would be an effort to go somewhere daring with the plot, the network said no, the actors and writers would leave and be replaced, and the reset button would get whacked again. The biggest legacy from this series was its efforts to go for younger demos than other such daytime shows were doing at that time, bringing in new blood during the afternoon. That, and giving Donna Mills her first serious break.
Love, American Style (ABC, 1969 to 1974)
For five seasons, this series provided an anthology that allowed from one to four stories per hour, punctuated by interconnecting gags that often featured a couple in a brass bed that showed up out of doors for no reason. Hey, people in love in the ’70s, you know… Appearing in these stand-alone stories in the series was, well, just about everyone; if an actor had a title card on a comedy in the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s, that person was very likely in one of the stories. (You could probably build a drinking game out of trying to guess someone from then who was not on an episode; we accept no responsibility for any injury should you try this.) Among these numerous people were Ronny Howard, Marion Ross, and Anson Williams; their short piece, “Love and the Happy Days” from Season 2, ultimately became the pilot for the series Happy Days.
To Rome with Love (CBS, 1969 to 1971)
John Forsythe, playing a recently widowed professor, picks up his kids to take a teaching position in Rome, where the family spent their time, bitching about being in the romantic Eternal City and pining to go back to Iowa. About the only real, solid claim to fame this show had was that on its way to cancellation, it gave up its original time slot to allow CBS to roll out a new sitcom, All In the Family.
Amateur’s Guide to Love (CBS, 1972)
For two months, CBS ran a game show on daytime that involved a Candid Camera-esque ambush of a poor person in Southern California, who would then be placed in a comedic love/relationship/sex-themed situation where they’d have to choose from two options, then give their choice back in the studio after a panel of celebrity judges (none of whom will admit today to ever doing this) had ruled on what should be done. You agree with the celebs, you won. This horrible hybrid of the Judgment of Paris and Family Feud died ignobly; the fact that CBS wiped all of these episodes after they supposedly had a program retention policy in place says something about how bad this was.
Bridget Loves Bernie (CBS, 1972 to 1973)
While a lot of dramas use the trope “love conquers all” as their closing point, few sitcoms before or since made it a recurring motif through their run. Rich, Irish Catholic teacher Bridget Fitzgerald (Meredith Baxter) meets and marries working class Jewish cab driver Bernie Steinberg (David Birney), and the rest of the series spends its time watching everyone around them freak out over it (mostly her parents). Supposedly, its short run on the air was due to a network decision to not deal with the hate mail, despite coming in fifth on the weekly Nielsens throughout the season. While the network didn’t want to deal with a mixed marriage, the stars did; Baxter and Birney married in real life after cancellation and stayed together for 15 years.
Love Story (NBC, 1973 to 1974)
Okay, yes, this series was tied to film you’re thinking of, kinda; it did share the theme from the movie, and that was about it. Like the other Love Story series on Dumont, this was also an anthology, which had bigger budgets and showcased such talents as Frank Langella, Barbara Hershey, and Jodie Foster. But, tangential association through the theme proved to be a bitch; every week viewers who tuned in and didn’t see Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neil convinced others not to do the same, and after 12 episodes (all aired against Kojak) the show was pulled, with no one to ask: where is the love?
Paul Sand in Friends & Lovers (CBS, 1974 to 1975)
Anyone who’s tried to set up two people thinking that they would be perfect together can tell you: what looks good on paper might not work in real life. Paul Sand had everything aligned properly for his network vehicle: The show was an MTM Enterprises production, which until then hadn’t had a flop. The talent tied to the show, with James L. Brooks as executive producer, and a cast that included Penny Marshall and Steve Landesberg, seemed like a slam dunk. And yet, 15 episodes later, Sand’s sitcom about a bass player with the Boston Symphony Orchestra had a run that went faster than Chopin’s “Minute Waltz.” The only legacy the program ended up having was to serve as a placeholder for the show that replaced it which had a longer run, The Jeffersons.
Lovers and Friends (NBC, 1977 to 1978)
Speaking of blips, this daytime drama, a tangential spinoff from Another World that dealt with two families from different socio-economic backgrounds in the fictional Chicago suburb of Point Claire, had plotlines that feel like they were directly lifted soon after by Soap, right before this series retooled under a new name, For Richer, For Poorer. The fact that they abandoned their first title midway through its short life almost excluded it from the list, but who am I to argue against Buckminster Fuller…?
Loves Me, Loves Me Not (CBS, 1977)
In between playing an organ for The Partridge Family and arguing a case in LA Law, Susan Dey played the affection of accident-prone Kenneth Gilman in this six episode act of desperation that CBS commissioned on the quick. The only lessons learned from this were by Witt/Thomas Productions, the producer tasked with bringing this show to air, which would go on to do much better shows than this, starting with the above-mentioned Soap.
The Love Boat (ABC, 1977 to 1987)
You can look on this series as everything that was either so good about TV from the 1970s, or so wrong about it. Of all the anthologies about love discussed here, this was easily the most successful, benefiting from a set formula that every encounter took place (usually) aboard the MS Pacific Princess, who like a lot of TV stars after her run, got herself into trouble with the law and creditors. But while she was on the air, she hosted a memorable regular cast, along with a slate of guest stars that included Andy Warhol and Halston and Bob Mackee together, as well as a list of guests comparable to the guests that appeared on Love, American Style, which means if you need a new drinking game, then, well…
Husbands, Wives and Lovers (CBS, 1978)
Supposedly, Joan Rivers knew what was funny. The fact that this TV series she created for CBS lasted only 10ten episodes before getting yanked, begs to differ. But then again, who hasn’t told a joke that bombed?
The Love Experts (Syndicated, 1978 to 1979)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJN480u3bc
A talk show-game show hybrid, where the guest would discuss his or her love life while four celebrities kibitzed, the kibitzer with the best advice “won” the show, however great a prize that was. Among the celebrities who were classed as “experts” were veterans JoAnn Worley and Nipsey Russell, along with such up-and-comers as Jamie Lee Curtis and David Letterman.
Really, if anything about the use of “love” in the title can be gleamed from this article it’s probably this:
