Weekend Flop TV: LOVE ON A ROOFTOP

As I said earlier, of all the shows created by Canada’s Bernard Slade (The Flying Nun, The Partridge Family, Bridget Loves Bernie) his 1966-7 flop was his favourite, and one of the few shows he cared enough about to stick around and be the head writer for the entire season. It was a Barefoot In the Park type of romantic comedy about newlyweds, and starred familiar TV face Peter Duel and skinny British comedienne Judy Carne (soon to become famous on Laugh-In). A young Rich Little played the wacky neighbour. Slade recalled his year on the show this way:

I really put a lot into “Love On A Rooftop” and it was a terrific show. It was a charming, funny show and was much better than “That Girl”. We even got a better rating than “That Girl”, yet they got picked up and ran for 5 years and we got cancelled. I thought it was ridiculous to spend so much time on something like that again. By doing pilots, your time is your own. As story editor, you have to be in the studio every day rewriting other people’s material and you are sitting in story conferences every day. When I wrote pilots, I would be in Europe some of the time and they wouldn’t know where I was – and didn’t care because they knew the material would always come in. It was a much easier life.

GH: To wrap up: Which do you feel is your best series?

BS: I think it was “Love On A Rooftop”. We had a wonderful lead actor, Pete Duell, and a terrific supporting cast, too. It was a charming show about a young married couple and it was funny and reasonably intelligent.

The episode presented here is the pilot, though there were better episodes later in the run (like the one where Duel gets a job that requires him to be an advertising mascot in a medieval knight costume).

Act 1:

Act 2: