The greatest movie ever made..!

It is a performances centric movie

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Back in the 1970s Aaron Spelling brought us such execrable TV shows as "Charlie's Angels", "Starsky and Hutch", "Fantasy Island", "The Love Boat", and others. Spelling didn't attempt to promote the shows as great dramatic art, preferring to produce (as he called it) "candy for the mind". These were shows that had cardboard characters, childish plots, stupid dialogue, and no real value. Spelling was very perceptive, since he realized that when people came home from work, they wanted something simple and unchallenging, with no real plot or substance."American Dreams" ran from 2002 to 2005 and had intelligent plots, great acting, good cinematography, and complex characters. I guess that's what its problem was—people had to actually think while they were watching, instead of drooling over Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith or watching David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser screeching around town in a hot red car while acting out insultingly sophomoric scripts every week."American Dreams" told the story of a middle-class Catholic family in Philadelphia during the mid-1960s. The show was basically a soap opera, with many intertwining plot elements every week. The show's story began in 1963 and featured such subjects as the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Beatles, sexual orientation, the U.S. space program, and many others. The intelligent scripts were enacted by a dynamite cast of virtual unknowns, all portrayed against the backdrop of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand". Viewers didn't have to tolerate great quantities of snickering, suggestive dialogue, car chases, or constant gunplay.The show lasted three seasons and unfortunately never achieved top ratings. The cast members were uniformly excellent and included Brittany Snow, Tom Verica, Will Estes, Gail O'Grady, Vanessa Lengies, Jonathan Adams, and many others. The younger members of the cast were surprisingly professional and believable, but everyone performed at a very high level.It's a shame that "American Dreams" was canceled after only three seasons. I suppose people would rather watch John Ritter fall down and Suzanne Somers jiggle in "Three's Company", because that idiotic show lasted a lot longer. That's unfortunate, but it does indicate why American prime time television is so bad and why our expectations are so low.

How do you recreate something that only happens once when it was like a dream that captured the imagination of a whole country? I have been watching season 1 on DVD and it appears that is what is the goal of this program. It pretty much does the job too. It tries to recreate the history on American Bandstand and the feelings of the era. Here is how it started- It premiered locally in late September 1952 as Bandstand on Philadelphia television station WFIL-TV Channel 6 (now WPVI-TV), as a replacement for a weekday movie that had shown predominantly British movies. The original host was Bob Horn, but no one remembers that start. In late spring of 1957, the ABC television network asked their O&O's and affiliates for programming suggestions to fill their 3:30 p.m. (ET) time slot (WFIL had been pre-empting the ABC programming with Bandstand). Clark decided to pitch the show to ABC president Thomas W. Moore, and after some badgering the show was picked up nationally, becoming American Bandstand on August 5, 1957. Clark had been hosting since 1956 and would continue to host until 1989 when the run ended.While the recreation of this era is not entirely accurate, the setting and the spirit are all captured here. The recent death of Dick Clark who took the only local show that premiered in Philadelphia and made it a nationwide success is a spirit that still lives on. What is important to remember is what this show did for the music industry in America. This show put American music on the map. The National exposure from Bandstand began the modern music era.Nearly every artist and every top 10 song for over 3 decades would appear on the program. This show tries to recreate Philadelphia in the era of televisions start. The drama of getting on the show, the back stage politics, and other events of the era are something that has now passed into history. Even the show would eventually move to California before it's run ended.Still, the series recaptures some of the magic. I doubt it could be done much better. The dvds have extra music and some real footage of Dick Clark interviewing singers of the era. The only wish is that there could be more of that stuff.This history is now the stuff of museum's as we are in a totally different age. This show is the best blast to that past available.In Memory - Dick Clark 2012 & Bob Horn 1966 plus others who pioneered a great era of music and television.

No show has made me cry more over little things… the death of Kennedy, all the times Meg says that "she's doing it for JJ", the many scenes with the whole Pryor family worrying about JJ even though you know he's okay… even a hug between father and daughter, or two friends reuniting after being in a fight have made me cry… why? Because the characters don't just overcome things, they push the boundaries and make the world a better place one day at a time. They set the path for what would be the world I live in today: and as a child of the 2000 era (I was born in 1983), it shows me that this world – our world - is a better place because of the fight that was led on by the courageous minds of the 60's and 70's. Honestly, I could watch this show over and over again, because it gives me hope that what we do makes a difference… maybe not on the short run but on the long run, absolutely. It keeps me from becoming jaded. I too want to keep pushing the boundaries, so that 40 years from now, our children can look back and see the work we've done… and the work that's left to do.

I really enjoy watching American Dreams. I was born in the late 60's (67) and I've always heard stories about things that happened and now I can have see how things went along. I like seeing the old black & white TV's in Mr. Pryors store, I remember having those old TV's and the way the flipped and rolled but we loved watching it, now days you turn on the TV and get mad because they changed shows, it's nice to remember how it used to be and to see how far we have come. I hope every American can try to live their American Dream. I had heard that they were going to take it off the air but I'm hoping it is just here say. Let's all keep telling them how much we enjoy the show to keep it alive!