Danny Bonaduce’s Dad Got Booted From ‘The Partridge Family’ Set for Making Shirley Jones ‘Uncomfortable’

The Partridge Family set probably would’ve been better off if Danny Bonaduce’s dad hadn’t gone and met everybody. 

The actor revealed that his real-life father, the late screenwriter Joseph Bonaduce, didn’t just fail to jive with his TV family, but was permanently booted from the set for making his on-screen mother, Shirley Jones, “really uncomfortable.” 

Bonaduce remained tight-lipped on the specifics of how his dad managed to get on his TV mom’s bad side, but explained that his father “thought Shirley Jones liked him a lot more than she did,” before being ejected from set, which is rumored to have happened during the show’s second season. 

Despite clearly rubbing the actress the wrong way, Joseph wasn’t too distraught over his ban from the TV production. “He took it as a badge of honor,” Bonaduce said on a newly reposted episode of The Real Brady Bros podcast from April 2024, and recalled that his dad insisted that he’d “been kicked out of better places than The Partridge Family.”

Considering his dad famously “hated” the show, this reaction likely wasn’t too surprising. “My family did not like that I was on the part of the show,” he continued. “It caused some real rifts in my life.”

That was probably for the best, though, as it helped keep his dad as far from the premises as possible.