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Bonaduce sparks reflections – Metro US

Bonaduce sparks reflections

COME ON GET HAPPY: I’ve been doing this job long enough that I’m rarely moved to stop and think to myself, “Well, that was weird”, or “Well, it beats working in an asbestos mine.” For some reason I did find myself pausing briefly in the middle of my day and shaking my head at this strange job I have when I got off the phone with Danny Bonaduce after a brief but hilarious interview.

If you’re old enough to remember when David Bowie was considered new and edgy and toe socks weren’t ironic, you probably watched the Partridge Family on network primetime. The show was designed to be a vehicle for David Cassidy and his stepmom, Shirley Jones, but it ended up making a star out of Bonaduce, who couldn’t sing and wasn’t particularly cute, but who ended up being the mouthpiece for everyone who was well below the age of majority as the ‘70s ground on in their dispirited fashion. Wry and unimpressed, with little patience for warmed over hippie rhetoric, but mystified by the hostile indifference he inspired in Ruben Kincaid, the band’s manager, Bonaduce’s Danny Partridge was a Gen-X standard bearer before we were able to define ourselves as such.

Bonaduce had a bad fallout with fame, and he’s used that experience as the inspiration for I Know My Kid’s A Star, his VH1 reality show, debuting on Much More Music this Sunday evening at 8pm EST. It’s a nasty trainwreck of a show, but sickeningly watchable, and my interview with Danny will run in Metro next week. In the meantime, I’m still kind of buzzing from the thought that, at least a couple of times this afternoon, I said “f**k” to Danny Partridge. My 8-year-old self is still kind of thrilled.

JUICELESS: I didn’t think it was going to happen either, but I couldn’t resist running with it, just to imagine the contortions people would go through to watch O.J. on primetime. According to Hal Boedeker, TV writer of the Orlando Sentinel, the rumour that O.J. Simpson was begging for a slot on the next season of The Apprentice is false.

“Completely false,” said a network spokesoman. “NBC has not considered him and will not cast him on the show.”

As one commenter on the Sentinel site put it wisely, the hassle of dealing with canceled advertisers – not to mention the likelihood that the show’s corporate sponsors would pull out faster than a father of 12 – likely outweighed the neutron bomb effect an O.J. Apprentice would have NBC’s competition. Being the only channel most of the sentient world is watching is one thing; being forced to sell cut rate ad time in spite of this to bail bondsmen and hair replacement drug companies is another. And frankly, thinking about it was always going to be more fun than actually having to watch the thing.