The Partridge Family: Season 04 (1973)

The fourth and final season of The Partridge Family finds the familiar players still in their familiar roles: Shirley Jones as Shirley Partridge, widowed mom and lead singer of the musical Partridge aggregation; David Cassidy (by now a full-fledged teen idol) as oldest son Keith Partridge; Susan Dey as oldest daughter Laurie Partridge; Danny Bonaduce as middle son Danny; Brian Foster as youngest son Chris; Suzanne Crough as youngest daughter Tracy; and Dave Madden as the Partridges' long-suffering agent, Reuben Kinkaid, who with each passing year has more and more trouble sustaining his self-proclaimed "I hate kids" policy. Season four heralds the arrival of three new semi-regulars. In the opening episode, Ricky Segall is introduced as four-year-old Ricky Stevens, a neighbor kid who occasionally performs with the Partridges. Later in the season, Reuben's neurotic nephew Alan Kinkaid (Alan Bursky) moves in with his uncle, almost immediately losing his shyness and self-loathing when, at the Partridges' urging, he launches a career as a standup comic. And finally, Jackie Coogan takes over from Ray Bolger in the role of Shirley Partridge's fun-loving dad. The season's best episodes include the one in which Reuben becomes convinced that he doesn't have long to live, the one where Laurie enjoys a shipboard romance with a self-proclaimed aristocrat during a working cruise to Acapulco, the episode in which Danny drops out of school, and the one where he contemplates converting to Judaism. Among the guest stars appearing during The Partridge Family's final season are Cheryl Ladd (then billed as Cheryl Jean Stopelmoor) as one of Keith's several objects of affection, Richard Mulligan (Soap) as an international diplomat and notorious ladies' man who develops a yen for Shirley, and, in the series' very last episode, Academy Award winner George Chakiris as Shirley's old flame "Cuddles" (aka Captain Charles Corwin). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi