They’ll never finish remodeling The Brady Bunch
Image: Graphic: Natalie Peeples TV Features For Our Consideration
When I was a kid, my brother and I had a game we’d play after school: How quickly can you guess which Brady Bunch episode you’re watching? One tip-off was the music: If the kids ran into the house to a tune with an upbeat tempo, (do-do-dooo-do, do-do-do-dooo-do…), it was likely a fun-filled episode featuring a celebrity guest star or perhaps a road trip in a camper. If one of the kids strolled into the house with their head dragging, Charlie Brown-style, with the incidental music playing at a slower pace (wah-wah-waaaaah-wah, wah wah wah waaahhh-wah), it was probably going to be more of a downer episode, about an unrequited crush or not making a team.
The clues didn’t really matter: We usually guessed the correct episode in 10 seconds or so. We knew them all. We were the target demographic for The Brady Bunch in syndication, settling down with it every weekday for a full hour, lying on the scratchy loden front-room carpet with our chins in our hands. There were other shows we loved: The Partridge Family had the advantage in the musical department, and we raced through dinner to watch Happy Days every Tuesday night. But none captivated us like The Brady Bunch, which has maintained a similar hold on pop culture for decades, never leaving for long. As recently as late 2019, the now-AARP-eligible Brady kids were still reuniting for new onscreen adventures. This time, it was under the roof of the split-level ranch that they never actually shared as a family, though their TV characters did—if you ignored the fact that its groovy mid-20th-century interiors were actually located on a soundstage. There they were, 50 years later, renovating that Studio City house to resemble those Paramount Studios sets, with the help of some extremely 21st-century celebrities: the onscreen personalities of HGTV. The Bradys were blurring the lines between real life and fantasy—and not for the first time.
In a half-century, The Brady Bunch has evolved from sitcom to cartoon to variety show to drama to parody to reality series, molding and re-molding itself to fit the prevailing styles, tastes, and sensibilities of multiple eras. It all began in the late 1960s, when Gilligan’s Island producer Sherwood Schwartz wanted to capitalize on the different types of families that were following in the wake of a relatively new wave of no-fault divorce, the sort seen in big-screen comedies like Yours, Mine, And Ours and With Six You Get Eggroll. This was the zeitgeist that produced Schwartz’s famously blended Bradys, even if their show never mentioned the “d” word: a widower with three sons marrying a widow—or is she a divorcée?—with three daughters
The story of a lovely lady (Florence Henderson) bringing up three very lovely girls (Maureen McCormick, Eve Plumb, and Susan Olsen) and forming a family with a man named Brady (Robert Reed), who was busy with three boys of his own (Barry Williams, Christopher Knight, and Mike Lookinland), wasn’t much of a hit in its original broadcast run. The Brady Bunch aired on ABC for five seasons, beginning in 1969, yet never cracked the Nielsen Top 30. But other factors helped sustain the Bradys’ longevity. Previous sitcoms like Family Affair and The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father also had school-aged characters, but this one was primarily focused on the kids’ viewpoints, not the parents’. The younger Bradys had the adults greatly outnumbered, leading to a plethora of plots involving sibling rivalry, school, dating, and other topics that their peers watching at home could relate to.
And unlike previous generations of adorable TV moppets, the Brady kids fought. A lot. Marcia and Greg ran against each other in the race for student body president; quintessential middle child Jan nursed a long-standing envy of her big sister. The fact that a sitcom-perfect family like the Bradys had their squabbles, and always stuck together at the end, was a valuable lesson for those of us who quarreled constantly with our siblings. The years separating the Brady kids also made for an easy transition for the young viewer: Start out watching at Bobby or Cindy’s age and you might idolize the older brothers and sisters, only to wind up relating more to Greg and Marcia as you grew older and returned to the show in syndication.
Those reruns were another component of the Bradys’ enduring popularity, often packaged in a local station’s after-school “Brady Bunch Hour.” It was easy to get caught up on all 117 episodes, and then rewatch them, while the look and layout of the Brady house imprinted itself on your brain: the wood paneling in the TV room, the toilet-free kids’ bathroom, the bizarre horse sculpture under the open staircase. And from that level of familiarity springs the third pillar of Brady immortality, unique to this franchise: As ubiquitous reruns fueled the series’ popularity, its characters proved flexible enough to fit an assortment of TV and film formats.
Schwartz was only too happy to revisit his creation, whether the request came from an animation studio (for Filmation’s weak Archie knockoff, The Brady Kids) or psychedelic Saturday-morning kingpins Sid and Marty Krofft (for the retina-searing train wreck The Brady Bunch Variety Hour). TV reunion movies The Brady Girls Get Married (1981) and A Very Brady Christmas (1988) each led to spin-offs, but neither the odd-couple comedy The Brady Brides (1981) nor the hour-long drama The Bradys (1990) lasted longer than a season. The kids who’d tracked their own growth from Kitty Karry-all to “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” to crushes on Davy Jones were given a whole new set of Brady yardsticks to measure their own lives against—though none ever achieved the staying power of the original Brady Bunch.
Despite that lack of success, whenever all nine original cast members—let’s not forget Ann B. Davis as live-in housekeeper Alice—got the chance to work together again, they signed up, give or take the occasional ripe-for-lampooning holdout. The Bradys’ familial bond had transferred to the actors who played them, and they kept bringing other people together, too. When the typically hackneyed A Very Brady Christmas debuted in 1988, my then-twentysomething friends and I devoured it eagerly, howling over plot points like architect dad Mike finding his way out of a collapsed construction site thanks to the sound of his family singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”
Rather than adopt an ill-fitting seriousness—Marcia’s an alcoholic! Bobby’s auto-racing career ends in a wreck! Greg grows a mustache!—to get with the changing times, the Bradys would only survive the ’90s by being who they’d always been: a vision of the American family as corny, inauthentic, and tied to the 1970s as their AstroTurf backyard. So it was with The Real Live Brady Bunch, the stage show created by Jill and Faith Soloway that debuted at Chicago’s Annoyance Theater in 1990, which draped the likes of Jane Lynch and Andy Richter in polyester for faithful reenactments of vintage Brady scripts—underlining their schmaltz and phoniness in the process. The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) took a similar, affectionately snarky approach, depicting the Bradys as an out-of-touch family that hadn’t changed at all since their eponymous TV show had ended, sitcom-earnest fish swimming through ironic ’90s waters of grunge, Guess jeans, and car jackings. The film opened at the top of the weekend box office; A Very Brady Sequel brought a very Brady Hawaiian getaway to theaters the next summer.
The satirical message was clear: The Bradys’ idyllic existence was an unattainable facsimile of real life, an example even its stars couldn’t live up to. Barry Williams’ autobiography, Growing Up Brady: I Was A Teenage Greg, provided the flip side to the stage and screen spoofs’ funhouse mirror. Williams scandalized fans by revealing that he once went on an innocent “date” with his TV mom, Florence Henderson; that he had showed up on set stoned; and that all three of the Brady kids’ male-female sibling pairings had harbored some level of romantic interest for the other. In Maureen McCormick’s own book, Here’s The Story: Surviving Marcia Brady And Finding My True Voice, she writes candidly about her eating disorder and a cocaine addiction that she says harmed her career irreparably.
The illusion of the original series shattered like mom’s favorite vase in the path of a rogue basketball, with the next generation of Brady projects eschewing laugh tracks and third-act resolutions for something grounded in reality—or a heightened form of it, anyway. This was more than future primetime stars Kaley Cuoco and Adam Brody playing versions of Williams and McCormick who can’t stop making out with each other while in character in the 2000 NBC adaptation of Growing Up Brady. This was America’s Next Top Model winner Adrianne Curry living out countless fans’ daydreams by romancing Peter Brady while she and Christopher Knight were on The Surreal Life. In grand Brady tradition, their onscreen courtship led to a wedding and a three-season spin-off on VH1, but My Fair Brady and a few respectable runs on Dancing With The Stars were merely reality-TV dress rehearsals for last year’s A Very Brady Renovation, in which McCormick, Knight, Williams, Plumb, Olsen, and Lookinland reunited to transform “the Brady house” into… the Brady house.
In the years since The Brady Bunch ended, the residence at 11222 Dilling Street in Studio City, California—recognizable even without the words “created by Sherwood Schwartz executive producer” superimposed over it—had become a popular tourist destination. When the longtime owners decided to sell, they found plenty of prospective buyers—including ex-N’ Sync member Lance Bass—in the market for a piece of TV history. But they were all outbid by HGTV, whose producers paired the surviving Brady cast members with some of the channel’s top home-improvement personalities who, more often than not, were family themselves: Property Brothers Drew and Jonathan Scott, or Karen Laine and Mina Starsiak, the mother and daughter team of Good Bones. Meanwhile, various pairings of the original six Brady kids (no Geri Reischl substitutions, no cousin Oliver additions) assist, picking up Cindy’s favorite doll from Sherwood Schwartz’s daughter, or helping to identify the proper dining room set at a resale shop. After all, no one could be expected to know the Brady place as well as the six actors who basically lived in it for five years.
The experience is obviously emotional for the Brady cast, especially since it’s their first series en masse (reunion specials aside) since the deaths of their TV parents: Reed in 1992, and Henderson two decades later. (Ann B. Davis died in 2014.) The effect the Bradys have on the renovators is also compelling. No matter what generation they belong to, all the HGTV hosts bring their own memories to the job, and are committed to realizing them within these four walls. They feel the gravity of the task ahead of them, joking that “America will be so mad at us!” if the house isn’t exactly right.
The Brady Bunch is far from the best or even most memorable series to air on the small screen. But it’s hard to imagine another TV setting that the average viewer is able to visualize so clearly, down to the clown painting in the boys’ room and the floral wallpaper in the girls’. And as a lifelong Brady viewer, I found it fascinating to see the artifice of the most familiar house in TV history brought to life, as the Brady actors and the HGTV crew tracked down the oversized amber glass grapes for the coffee table, and the long-outdated avocado-colored kitchen appliances. The cast is as thrilled as the renovators that there’s finally a visible commode in the kids’ bathroom, and devoted viewers contribute their own knicknacks to the decor.
In the series finale, the cast and their guests wander through the finished Brady home. “Doesn’t this make you feel like you’re 12?” Williams asks rhetorically, while McCormick hugs a familiar stuffed animal in the girls’ room. Susan Olsen proudly takes pictures of her own kids on the iconic staircase. Florence Henderson’s daughter Barbara remarks as she spies the parents’ spot-on master bedroom, “It’s such a strange experience. You sort of go back in time, and have something that wasn’t real, become real.”
It’d be a fitting capper for the relationship The Brady Bunch has had with its viewers: turning an actual house into a fictional home is not unlike trying to create the perfect fake family and bring it to life. Over the decades, the actors have forged their own clan—an imperfect one, because the perfect family doesn’t exist. But if the Brady Bunch legacy concludes with A Very Brady Renovation, it’s the right note to end on. The cast banded together to memorialize the place where they spent so much of their childhood—and where we spent so much of ours as well.
106 Comments
What was the exact moment The Brady Bunch jumped the shark?
Cousin Oliver.
This article mentioned Happy Days. When did that show jump the shark?
When Chuck left to do ‘Willow.’
I know the reference is to Fonzy jumping the shark, but really when Richie left the show
This article mentioned Happy Days. When did that show jump the shark?This has still not yet been determined. Oddly enough, I did find this unrelated photo of Fonzie.
Weirdly, people think of the shark jumping episode as something that happened when the show was near its end, but it happened in season 5 of 11!
Probably intentionally, but “Cousin Oliver” not only is the right answer, but a famous enough example that some people actually use the phrase “Cousin Oliver” as an alternative to “jumping the shark” for other shows.
That shit with the tiki.
All the birds sing words and the flowers bloom?
Counterpoint: That shit was awesome. And hokey, corny, and juvenile, in the way only The Brady Bunch could be.
I would argue that the Brady Bunch was on the wrong side of the shark from the beginning, and that this was actually part of its enduring appeal.
The first episode.
Kids never really watched it because it was good or bad, they watched it with complete disregard to quality because it was on TV after school and they had limited viewing options. The concept of “shark jumping” never really applied to it.TLDR: Fucken Cousin Oliver
I watched first run Brady Bunch. It was on Saturday night and was followed by The Partridge Family. My sister and I and sometimes a friend got to go into my parent’s room and watch it on the TV in there, perhaps with some kind of handheld baked goods. At the first notes of the theme to Room 222 we clicked the set off, that show was too edgy!
mmmm…handheld baked goods.
Completely agree with this. It always sucked but we didn’t have anything else. But it did take a bizarre turn when the curly hair showed up on the father and Greg.
Yeah, I only ever watched it because it came on after either Gilligan’s Island afternoon reruns, or maybe Batman reruns. By the time I was in middle school I found the show unwatchable.(Unlike Gilligan, or even Batman)
This. As a kid, anything on TV is better than not watching tv.
My sister adored this show. Meanwhile, I wanted to watch The Lone Ranger and Batman.
They rode in on the shark, son.
Fuck you and the shark you rode in on!
Well, a wiser fella than myself once said, sometimes you jump the shark, and sometimes the shark, well, he jumps you.I think the latter applies in this case.
This joke’s got bite.
When the boys got perms.
When they started singing.
The secret pilot where we learn that Carol and Mike bonded and fell in love over the fact they both killed their first spouses for the insurance money
Well….that was an unusual choice for the Bradys…
Did Carol sabotage The Skipper’s boat to strand her husband The Professor? Is that why The Islands try to extract their revenge when she returns to Hawaii?
Did The Professor found The Dharma Project?
Cousin Oliver, or that back door pilot where the white dad ends up adopting three boys from various ethnic backgrounds. Lemme see if I can look it up. *pause* Yep, it was going to be called Kelly’s Kids and star Ken Berry from F Troop and Mayberry RFD.
It’s definitely Cousin Oliver, but that time they tried to spin off a different show with some of Mike and Carol’s friends was pretty bad, too. One of the friends was Ken Berry from the dusty old military sitcom ‘F Troop’, and the actor who would’ve played one of their kids was Mike Lookinland’s brother Todd Lookinland. It didn’t go anywhere, but if it had, I always thought it would be weird and funny if the son of one of Mike’s friends looked like one of Mike’s kids. HOWEVER, Wikipedia tells me that wouldn’t have been an issue because the kids would’ve been portrayed as being adopted. Oh well. Who knows who the hell Mike was banging back then. It was probably Ken Berry.Anyway, here’s the whole episode. It is not good.
F Troop was awesome, Ken Berry was awesome and your a big stupid head! Have a nice day and stay safe
*you’reDidn’t say I didn’t like F Troop. I have fond memories of watching that old fossil on Saturday afternoons. But regardless, it’s still dusty.
Dammit. I have that mistake as much as I loved Wrangler Jane
Kevin Costner stole the plot of F Troop to make Dances With Wolves.
Wanted Rickles as Wind in his Hair but couldn’t afford him
We’ll let you know.
Btw, there was an episode of Happy Days where a guy LITERALLY jumped over a shark, and it was awesome!
How could you brush over “The Brady Kids” cartoon so lightly? The fact that they now have two pet pandas and a magic-using bird should be enough for at least a clip. How about this one where Jan gets to hang out with WONDER WOMAN:
Larry Storch was the voice of the magical bird. I asked him about it once and he looked sort of confused.
And a dog, Mop Top, replacing the mysteriously vanishing dog from the original series, who we learned in the ‘90s had been run over when he left the set. The pandas were called Ping and Pong. Can’t recall the bird’s name. Myron the mynah bird? The animals were added at the command of then-ABC big man Fred Silverman, who insisted his networks’ (he led all three in the ‘70s) kids’ shows include animals.
Well written, thanks. I think the most amazing thing is that the entire cast would agree to get together for every single one of these reunions. I realize it’s probably the only thing they really had going (except maybe Henderson) but typically you have at least a few from a cast this size who skip it. It preserved the image that they were a real family.
Not every one. The Brady Bunch Hour featured a fake Jan. That’s why Lisa wasn’t on The Simpson Family Smile-Time Variety Hour.But I think that’s the only instance, which is remarkable, yes.
Didn’t Jennifer Runyon (from Charles in Charge and Ghostbusters) play grown-up Cindy in one of the TV movies?EDIT: Ah, yes, my memory served me correctly, she played Cindy in A Very Brady Christmas. I can’t remember what I had for lunch today, but I can remember that shit.EDIT 2: And now I notice that other people have already pointed this out.
As Gwen alludes to in the piece, often one cast member wouldn’t show up. It was always one of the daughters, but never the same one.The Brady Bunch Hour (1977) has Geri Reischl as Fake JanA Very Brady Christmas (1988) has Jennifer Runyon as Jake CindyThe Bradys (1990) has Leah Ayres as Fake Marcia
Jennifer Runyon, who helped Bill Murray “study the effect of negative reinforcement on ESP ability” at the beginning of Ghostbusters.
Oh, of course that’s the same person!
Yup. Nearly blew my damn mind when I IMDB’d that one.
I didn’t know you’d be giving me electric SHAWKS!
Jake Cindy is now my rookie cop gone rogue name.
Ha!(I didn’t even notice until I saw this comment)
Not sure how I missed that. Regardless, it does seem that they all have a very fond outlook towards the show and each other, and seeing them every so often as they aged has been fun.
Jake Cindy is my new favorite gender-fluid private eye.
Per Seth Rudetsky, Geri Reischl loves that one if her most enduring credits is as “Fake Jan.”
Actually the entire cast literally reunited ONCE. That was for “The Brady Girls Get Married” in 1981. For every other reunion, there was always a cast member missing.
Eve Plumb didn’t participate in “The Brady Bunch Variety Hour” in 1977. Susan Olsen didn’t participate in “A Very Brady Christmas” in 1988. Maureen McCormick didn’t participate in “The Bradys” in 1990. Their roles were played by Geri Reischl, Jennifer Runyon, and Leah Ayres respectively. The closest they got to a full reunion after that was “Still Brady After All These Years” in 2004, with Robert Reed having passed away in 1992.
Excellent piece about an extremely nonsensical show.
The original Brady run had already been over for a year when I was born. I was 6 in 1981, The year The Brady Girls Get Married premiered. I can so vividly remember sitting on my living room floor, just having pulled the TV Guide from the mailbox. I remember sitting there scrutinizing the print ad for the reunion movie like it had arrived from another planet. It was birthday times a thousand. Little squares with all of the actors faces..but older than i knew them. It was definitely my little kid version of some sort of religious experience. I had dreams about how the opening credits might (or might not) be updated. I remained a Brady freak for most of my young life and into my early twenties. I’d see the actors if they were appearing in any sort of local theater production. I bought, read, amended and footnoted Barry Williams book. I even went to see Maureen McCormick give a lecture on birth control and women’s reproductive issues at the U Penn. So random. A few years later, after I had mostly grown out of my Brady obsessions i would, by chance, end up working on a few of those late life reality shows and getting to briefly meet and work with those same people as ‘contemporaries.’ Weird full circle shit.Article was a nice little trip. Thanks.
Every time I see your user name, it makes me laugh. Especially now.
I’m sorry, but “With Six You Get Eggroll”?! What trip down wikipedia hell am I about to take…
Aw. That was much less overtly racist than I expected.
Yeah, when I read that my mind went, “Uh oh.”
Very nice article Gwen , I enjoyed it a lot.
Agreed. A terrific article. As mentioned by others, people like me watched this show because it was on TV. There was literally nothing else to watch and it became a de facto favorite because of it. I assume everyone who watched it felt the same way. Even as a young kid watching this, I was in on the “joke” that the show was incredibly corny and completely unlike real life. I mean, what kind of an architect designs his own dream home and doesn’t put enough bedrooms or bathrooms in it? Even as an 8 year old I knew that it was stupid but I enjoyed in anyway. Now that I have kids of my own, they watch it in the same way.
I mean, what kind of an architect designs his own dream home and doesn’t put enough bedrooms or bathrooms in it?I’ll give ‘em that one — presumably he designed for an already slightly above average sized family with three kids and didn’t figure on ending up with six. And adding on is subject to space and zoning considerations.Sure, they could have traded up (the paterfamilias was obviously raking it in pretty well), but an eight bedroom house (parents, one for each kid, and a live-in housekeeper) was and is mansion territory, or maybe an old rambling farmhouse someplace he couldn’t possibly commute from… and besides, crowding makes for better or at least easier situation comedy.
Otherwise, though, your analysis sounds about right.
I didn’t live in anything approaching a “dream home”, granted, but I grew up in a reasonable middle-class house from the 1960s. We had just one bathroom for the whole family. The idea that you should have a bathroom for every bedroom (or at least every other bedroom) is a relatively new idea.
There’s a great comedian on Screen Rant, Ryan George, who’s fantastic at debunking the bleeding obvious in plots:… That said, maybe Imperial Troops aren’t that accurate from 10 feet away.
I really hope Ryan George makes it beyond Youtube. He’s brilliant.
I have nothing to add except, “I did, too!”
I love the corny trashiness of the HGTV series of shows (the fact that there are now ‘secret’ hallways behind the walls of the Brady house makes me very happy), but that ‘My Fair Brady’ thing with Christopher Knight and Adrianne Curry was just gross. She was half his age, clearly a gold digger, and the way show focused on how often they boned just grossed me the fuck out.I saw Adrianne in line for Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland one time. She was hiding behind her phone pretending she didn’t want people looking at her. (She did.)Thanks, Gwen! You are easily one of the best writers here by a very wide margin.
I used to watch TBB every morning before 1st grade. I never laughed, but it was something to watch I guess? Better than Regis and Kathy Lee, until I started actually enjoying that show. Morning TV is weird
I always figured Mike and Carol met in a Strangers on a Train scenario, murdered each other’s spouse, and then fell in love.
I was definitely one of the fans of the show who was too young to remember it on it’s original run ( I was 2 when it ended in ‘74) but caught it on our local Philly syndicated station at 5 and 5:30 every single day and then a few year later at TBS at 4:35 (remember those TBS start times? ) after school. I must have watched the series from beginning to end dozens of times! Even to this day, my family and I quote it all the time. My wife will mention making pork chops and I’ll throw in “and applesauce?” A good excuse for not doing something of course is “Something suddenly came up.” Plenty of quotes to choose from!It’s always been amazing to me that this show, which I understand sort of paddled along in the ratings during its first run, has somehow endured for 50 years now.
Syndication was weird. Being born in 1970, I was clearly too young to have seen Brady Bunch, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, or the original Star Trek, and yet I did because in the 1970s and most of the 1980s, cable wasn’t ubiquitous. So we just watched whatever was on after school, which was largely 1960s shows in syndication.
Exactly right… pretty much everything I watched growing up was on syndicated stations, which were on our UHF dial. Same shows as you mentioned and throw in cartoons like The Flinstones or the old Bugs Bunny stuff. That’s probably part of the reason why kids today don’t seem as aware of the same older stuff as we were growing up, the opportunity to see that stuff isn’t as easy as simply turning on the TV.
Don’t forget “My Three Sons!”
Yes! It’s impossible for me to mention pork chops without adding a slurring “and appleshaush.” This is met with a look of confusion by everyone else in my household. My 60 year old husband missed the Brady Bunch phenomenon completely and our 12 year old daughter as only seen one or two episodes. So there I am, making pork chops in the kitchen and chuckling alone to myself.
I said it like that, out loud, when I read their comment. I almost did it again when I read yours.
I jerked off to Eve Plumb so often my palms used to grow fruit.
Easily the hottest of the Brady girls. She was Dawn, Portrait of a Teenage Runaway!
Brings back the time when I was eight or nine. I was watchin’ my mama’s T.V.
It was that great Grand Canyon rescue episode.
It took me far too long to identify the song (knew the singer immediately).I’m just a lonely visitor, but I’ve got it. Soul.
You and Dick Nixon.
When I saw that thrasher going by, looking more than two lanes wide, I was feeling like my day had just begun.
Burn your credit card for fuel.
I think it was on at least 4 times a day in the DC area in the 70s/80s. I loved it too. Knew every episode and wanted to be Marcia Brady SO BAD. I also would have loved to have Carol Brady as a mom. My mom was not so nice. It looked like a great place to be a kid. Love this article – thank you!
By Season 5, Marcia was a stone cold fox
Jesus, Rob. How could you possibly know her temperature? Weirdo.
Jan wields a machine gun in the movie Blue Ruin!
Eve Plumb is the shit. I love her on the HGTV shows. Always the coolest of the Brady kids (no matter what anyone said), the most lovely of the girls (in my opinion), and definitely the coolest adult, too. Her Wiki page is full of all kinds of fun stuff.“In 2016, she sold the Malibu home that she had purchased at the age of 11 in 1969. She bought the 1950s beach bungalow for $55,000 and sold it for $3.9 million.”
Mandatory:
Why did Marcia, Jan & Cindy dishonor their dead father by taking the name Brady? And why didn’t the kids ever come down to breakfast in their underwear, hair askew, scratching themselves, one of them ripping a loud fart?
Because the Brady-Martin bunch just didn’t have the same ring to it.
The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) took a similar, affectionately snarky approach, depicting the Bradys as an out-of-touch family that hadn’t changed at all since their eponymous TV show had ended,IMO that was what made that movie work.
Like they used a football to remodel Marcia’s nose?
I loved the show too, especially the home. I made a computer generated tour through the home so we can all get to walk through it. The video has over 159,000 views.
The Brady Bunch was something I got into in the early-mid 90s when the show got re-run in prime time here in Australia for some reason (replacing The Simpsons which was on hiatus at the time). The movie has a really special place in my heart. I love its absolutely spot-on take on the characters and even though they’re making fun of the whole concept, it’s never mean to the characters themselves who are utterly oblivious to the fact that the world has changed dramatically since the 1970s.
I agree. As much as The Brady Bunch Movie makes fun, it’s truly a love letter to the series. The time capsule stuff works. The fish out of water stuff works, the impressions are uncanny (Can you pick a best? I’m between Shelly Long’s Carol and Christopher Daniel Barnes’ Greg) and as you said, it does so without being mean-spirited. I’m not sure how it plays for anyone not intimately familiar with the original show, but I’d rank it among the best spoof movies ever.
Those are both great but I also love Alice. That’s such a spot on take on the character.There’s so many great moments but one of the bits I love is Davy Jones’ appearance. It’s just a joy to watch.
Alice is a great character. I loved how she went on vacation with the Bradys but still had to work. Sure, she got an all expenses paid trip to the Grand Canyon, got to wear unflattering dungarees and ride on a burro, but she still had to make everybody’s meals.
What, no love for Desi Arnaz Junior?
When I was a kid, my brother and I had a game we’d play after school: How quickly can you guess which Brady Bunch episode you’re watching?
My brother and I played this too, and not only for The Brady Bunch (a delightful show to know by heart), but we could do this with TGIF’s answer to the anti-Brady Bunch, Step By Step. As well as Saved By the Bell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Simpsons up to Season 7.
I met Barry Williams many moons ago — did a story about him doing some PR thing at a bar in far north suburban Chicago. (Far from glamorous, it was.) He was decent enough (to a reporter), but somewhat irately corrected everyone who called him “Greg” to “It’s Barry.” Needless to say, the drunks there didn’t gladly take his correction.
It must have taken an iron will to resist the urge to start this wonderful article with “Here’s the story…”
I have four words for you people:Beans in a flashlight.
This was a staple of after school tv for my entire elementary and middle school years. I know every episode intimately, and thrilled to the Brady house renovation show. I couldn’t believe they could find all those odds and ends, especially the giraffe for the girl’s room!This show is nearly unwatchable now, as I learned when I tried to introduce it to my daughter a few years ago. But I can’t help but love it in spite of itself. Can you imagine being hired for a mediocre sitcom at age 6 and still doing shows etc around this for the next 50 years? Who could imagine such a thing?
Man, I wish I had seen The Real Live Brady Bunch at The Annoyance Theater. My sister lived within walking distance of it, and one time when I was visiting we decided to see whatever happened to be playing there, which was a show called “Your Butt.” It was hysterical, but it was no Brady Bunch.