Jack employs Henry Walker, whose son Sam is among the few African-American students at East Catholic High School.
Meg and her best friend, Roxanne, pass the audition to dance on camera for Dick Clark's American Bandstand, filmed in the city, while JJ hopes to win a football scholarship to play for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
The show depicts historical events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 1964 Philadelphia race riot, and American involvement in—and opposition to—the Vietnam War.
The main difference is that American Bandstand did not move to Los Angeles in early 1964 but instead stayed in Philadelphia contrary to the real life events of the show.
In the pilot episode, set in November 1963, Meg and Roxanne win the opportunity to join the dancers on the TV show American Bandstand, filmed in Philadelphia.
A nagging ankle injury curtails his football career, so he enlists in the United States Marine Corps to pay for school.
In the early part of the season, Meg develops a crush on a Bandstand dancer, and they go on a couple of public appearance dates.
Meg later developed a romance with Luke Foley, a record store clerk and fellow East Catholic student.
Sam's father Henry states that there are only three other black male students at East Catholic; some in the majority-white student body resent Sam's presence, especially Tommy DeFelice, who is later expelled after falsely confessing to JJ's crime of breaking Beth's current boyfriend's windshield.
Sam and Meg develop a friendship, even creating a record-swapping club while meeting at the Vinyl Crocodile record store.
Meg dates a college boy, Drew, despite JJ and her father's strong dislike for him, but breaks it off when he ends up cheating on her.
Also in that episode, JJ is caught in a fierce firefight, while Meg and Sam are arrested at a campus rally protesting the Vietnam war.
Jack Pryor, newly elected to the Philadelphia City Council, is forced to take a bribe, with the money going to help JJ repay some gambling debts.
JJ Pryor applies for and receives a job in aeronautics, assisting in space suit design for future NASA missions to the Moon.
In the third season, the show was regularly beaten in the Sunday night ratings by ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and CBS's Cold Case.
This put the show up against CBS's Survivor: Palau and ABC's Lost, and American Dreams could not compete against these popular programs.
Fans of American Dreams organized a campaign to save the show, sending over 5000 supportive e-mails to NBC after the season finale and several thousand postcards to the network as well.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on April 12, 2005, that in late February, NBC ordered two endings filmed for the season finale.
[65] The un-aired ending was reported to be a 12-minute segment set on July 20, 1969 (the day Apollo 11 landed on the Moon), with Meg returning home to face her family after a three-year absence.
NBC was unable to attract sponsorship for the segment, which reportedly contained many rock-and-roll oldies, resulting in expensive music licensing fees for the network.
Once everyone goes inside, the scene pans out, with Neil Armstrong's famous moon landing address providing a voiceover until the screen goes black.
However, it is widely believed that the huge number of licensed songs on the series make future DVD releases cost prohibitive, although Prince said that was not the case.
[72][73] On January 26, 2009, it was reported that Prince and other producers from the show were negotiating to get the final two seasons released on DVD, along with including the unaired epilogue.
[74] No recent news was made until June 21, 2010, where it was reported that the producers "are closer than ever to debuting a boxed set of all three seasons of American Dreams on DVD".
At the second annual ATX Television Festival on June 9, 2013, Prince spoke out on the hold-up on the home media release of seasons 2 and 3, admitting that because of costly music licensing issues, it was unlikely that NBC would find it cost-effective to make those licensing deals unless fans campaigned to prove that the DVDs would sell, suggesting a Kickstarter campaign to gauge interest.
The first two seasons were shown in the United Kingdom (on the Hallmark Channel and Trouble), in Denmark (TV2), in Brazil (Sony Entertainment Television) and in Poland (TV Puls).