American Dreams

American Dreams was an American television drama program broadcast on the NBC television network. It debuted on September 29th, 2002. It initially aired on Sundays at 8:00pm but moved to the same time on Wednesdays starting March 9, 2005. Season 3 began on September 26, 2004. It was officially cancelled by NBC on May 16, 2005.

Accuracy

Despite its popularity as a family drama, American Dreams has been heavily criticized for its various levels of historical inaccuracy. Several historic events have been restaged earlier or later in the timeline to fit a plotline, and some of the music and pop culture references do not match up with the show's current timeline.

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Some examples of this include:

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• American Bandstand still tapes a daily after-school show in Philadelphia; where in real life the show moved to Los Angeles in February, 1964 and was only broadcast once a week, on Saturday afternoons (in real life, the studio used for Bandstand was later appropriated by Philadelphia public radio station WHYY).
• During the show's first season, the music of several artists, such as the Kinks, Dusty Springfield and Manfred Mann, are heard and referenced in 1963, months before the Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (February 1964) that triggered the musical British Invasion.
• When the Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, the scene is set up so that the first song the Beatles play is "I Want To Hold Your Hand," which although it was the Beatles' first American hit, it was not the first song played on Ed Sullivan (that honor goes to "All My Loving").
• In one episode in the show's third season, set in late November 1965, the East Coast Blackout of 1965 and the Leonid meteor shower were both "rescheduled" so that they would fall on the same day that Beth Mason gave birth to JJ Pryor's son.
• JJ and Beth have intimate relations in January 1965 and July 1965, yet Beth gives birth in November 1965, making her pregnancy either 11 months long or 5 months long.
• In the show's first season, set in November 1963, Meg Pryor and Luke Foley argue over the merits of Bob Dylan, and Luke hands Meg a 45 of Dylan singing "Mr. Tambourine Man." Dylan was two years away from writing that song; he never released it with his voice on a commercial 45; and when it was released, it was sung by the Byrds.
• References are made in the show's second season to I Dream of Jeannie, which was still a year away from premiering.
• The Monkees perform on the Bandstand stage in January 1966, despite their television series not even premiering until September 1966, or the four actors playing the Monkees even performing a live concert until a year later.
• While working at the space suit company, JJ Pryor meets Gus Grissom, and they discuss the Apollo 1 mission. Grissom later says, "Get me back to Cape Canaveral." In reality, the Apollo 1 mission was not designated by that number or name until after the accident that claimed the lives of Grissom and two other astronauts (at the time the mission was known as Apollo/Saturn 204), and the reference to Cape Canaveral would have been wrong, as the area where the space center was located had been renamed "Cape Kennedy" during the 1960's. While the town was officially renamed back to Cape Canaveral in 1973, the space station was (and still is) known as the Kennedy Space Center, and at least three years had passed since the town was renamed from Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy; so although it is not impossible that in a casual conversation Grissom would have used the traditional name, it is still unlikely that this would happen).
• Artists such as Blake Shelton, John Ondrasik and Joss Stone are allowed to perform their current pop hits, which in real time would have been 40 years away from ever existing.
• Neither The Who nor Ricky Nelson ever performed on the Bandstand stage in real life (Nelson's father Ozzie refused to allow his performing son to appear on anybody else's TV series, even if such appearance might help increase record sales); but that didn't stop the producers from staging performances by those artists in this series.
• In an episode that is supposedly taking place in the spring of 1965; Two customers at the TV store, played by Days Of Our Lives actors John Aniston and Frances Reid, were watching an episode of Days Of Our Lives on a TV(Frances was watching herself on an early episode). Days Of Our Lives did not premier until November 8, 1965.