Busting Loose: Adam Arkin and Pat Carroll - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

Busting Loose aired from January until November 1977 on CBS.

After graduating from engineering school young 24 year old Lenny Markowitz ( Adam Arkin)decided it was time to find his own place , away from his overprotective parents Sam and Pearl ( Jack Kruschen, Pat Carroll). He secretly moved into a run-down apartment building and set up housekeeping. Since he could not even afford to cover up the ducks on the wallpaper left by the previous tenant , it was not exactly a swinger's pad. It did have compensations, however, most notably his next-door neighbor Melody ( Barbara Rhoades) , a beautiful young woman who worked for an escort service. To make money on a temporary basis, until he could find more suitable employment, Lenny went to work as a salesman at Mr. Cabell's ( Paul B. Price's) shoe store, where he worked with a " hip" black named Raymond ( Ralph Wilcox). Lenny's buddies, Lester, Allan, Vinnie, and Woody ( Danny Goldman, Steve Nathan, Greg Antonacci, Paul Sylvian), were frequent visitors to his place and partners in mischief, as when they left the New York setting of the series to hunt girls at a fashionable Catskills resort. In the fall of 1977, Lenny found a regular girlfriend in a curvaceous young beauty named " Jackie Gleason" ( no relation to the famous tv comedian. She was played by Louise Williams).

An Article from The March 1977 People Magazine

* March 07, 1977
* Vol. 7
* No. 9

The Son Also Rises: Adam Arkin, TV's Newest Star, Inherited His Dad's Funnybone

By Sue Ellen Jares

My father told me a month on the series could make me better known than he is," says Adam Arkin. "He has mixed feelings about that. He's worked in this industry for 25 years."

At 20, Adam finds himself in the enviable position of heading up his own TV series, Busting Loose. And while no one is yet putting down protean actor-director Alan Arkin as "Adam Arkin's father," Busting Loose shows fair signs of vaulting Adam to the airier reaches of TV stardom. It is one of the few successes on the lackluster new CBS schedule.

As Lenny Markowitz, an Upper West Side kid on the lam from parental smother love, the likable Arkin plays the closest thing to a male Rhoda. "The character of Lenny is contained in me," says Adam. "But I've had a lot less sheltered existence than he has." In his famous New York acting family (his stepmother is writer-actress Barbara Dana, descendant of author Richard Henry Dana), Adam recalls, "We all were in analysis for about three years—I was about 12 or 13 when I asked to go." On his first stay in Hollywood two years ago, he admits trying "a little foolish experimenting with drugs. But I was never badly hooked."

Even now Arkin thinks he's in a "whacko business" filled with "insanity and weirdness." Busting Loose's exhausting rehearsals and tapings before a live audience consume all his waking hours before he collapses at midnight into a rented bed in the Beverly Comstock Hotel. Sadly, that is the same building where another overnight TV star, his downstairs neighbor Freddie Prinze, killed himself. (Adam was asleep at the time and heard nothing.)

"I've been lucky in that my father helped me understand what not to expect from success. Anything you go into success with—positive or negative—will stay with you. That," Adam reflects, "may be part of what happened to Freddie."

Arkin is close to both his real mother and his father—they were divorced when he was 4. He lived with his mother, Jeremy Wakefield, a plant store owner, in St. Louis and San Luis Obispo, Calif. until he was 11. After his father remarried, Adam moved back to New York. An admitted "underachiever" at the Professional Children's School, he was self-educated "by going on location with my father to places like Mexico and Selma, Ala." Alan ("I've seen his ability since he was very young") cast his son in his 1970 Oscar-nominated short, People Soup, and at 13 Adam had a walk-on as a fighter pilot in Catch-22.

By the time he left high school, Adam had given up both college plans and a sideline as a rock drummer ("I'm a so-so drummer—I do lots of things mediocrely"). He acted in summer stock and later with his parents at Connecticut's Hartman Theatre. He guested on TV shows like Happy Days and Hawaii 5-0, made a commercial for Dentyne and has turned upperbrow for a forthcoming drama on PBS's Visions.

So far Adam is unworried that Busting Loose will forever typecast him as a Jewish Fonzie. "I can play a Greek or an Armenian or an Italian—any of the hairy guys," he jokes.

Even if Busting Loose winds up just busted, Adam doesn't foresee "a huge fall." For one thing, his girlfriend, Kathy Cunningham, a Barnard sophomore, is in New York "and we've been apart most of the three years we've known each other." (They have agreed not to date others.) Then, too, the Arkin acting legacy is hardly threatened. Waiting in the wings is Adam's brother Matthew, 16, who already has starred on Kojak.

To read some articles on Busting Loose go to http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=P34qAAAAIBAJ&sjid=A1cEAAAAIBAJ&dq=busting%20loose%20adam%20arkin&pg=6740%2C1256297 and http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=WFAcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=olEEAAAAIBAJ&dq=busting%20loose%20adam%20arkin&pg=3827%2C4372206

For an episode guide go to http://ctva.biz/US/Comedy/BustingLoose.htm

To watch a promo of Busting Loose go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhipNf-vcI