"Here's the story, of a lovely lady..."
With those lyrics began the most famous TV show theme song this side of "Star Trek's" opening narration of "Space, the final frontier..." "The Brady Bunch" began as just another sitcom, but years after its final first-run episode aired, the show became a pop culture phenomenon. "Brady Bunch" creator Sherwood Schwartz said he came up with the idea for the show after reading a statistic in 1965 that said marriages where one or both spouses already had children was approaching 30 percent. "No show had ever been done like that, so it set me to thinking because as a writer this opened a new world," Schwartz said. "Here was the possibility of not just sibling rivalry, but cross-sibling rivalry."
Schwartz said he attributes the show's emergence as a cultural phenomenon to the reruns airing in syndication. "We became an extended family for a lot of kids who had been the subject of divorce or single parents," he said. "They longed to be in a family that was getting along that well. Most people don't even think of the fact that it's a blended family."
A difference with "The Brady Bunch" that many kids did notice is that they actually went on location for filming. Among the famous "Brady Bunch" trips, they visited a ghost town, the Grand Canyon, Hawaii, and Kings Island amusement park. Even though the show occasionally went outside, the Bradys were never perceptive enough to notice that the exterior and interior of their suburban home didn't match. How could you walk in the front door and be facing the stairs when the upstairs portion of the house on the exterior is to the right, not straight ahead? "I have no idea," Schwartz said. "Maybe [Mr. Brady] was an incompetent architect." Schwartz pointed out that every bedroom had a window that managed to look out into the backyard. Schwartz said another gaffe was when the young actors would call each other by their real names. "If you listen closely in two different episodes Barry Williams calls Jan 'Eve,'" Schwartz said. "In one he says, 'Out of my way, Eve,' and nobody caught it."
But such mistakes are easily forgiven by true Brady fans such as Erin Smith, co-editor of a Brady-focused zine, "Teenage Gang Debs." "It's the most perfect show ever," she said. "I do not think it's corny and heavy-handed. I'm not ashamed to watch it. I think adults can enjoy it and so can kids."
The original series was canceled
after a healthy five seasons. Schwartz said if it would have
continued, Mike Brady would have been written out of the show due to
clashes with actor Robert Reed. "There was talk of extending the show
for another two years, and we would have killed off the dad, because
he was a source of big problems to me, to the show, to the network
right from the very beginning because he was doing a show he didn't
want to do," Schwartz said. "We would have replaced him or just
changed the direction of the show. Kill him off and have the
adventures of the widow with six kids who are trying to fix her up
with another guy."
In the book Bradymania, Schwartz told author Elizabeth Moran there was also thought given to bringing back Carol's first husband. It would have been explained that he had been missing and had amnesia for five years! Mercifully, the show was canceled and none of these thoughts came to fruition.
At the same time as the original
series, an animated version, "The Brady Kids," ran from 1972-1974 as
part of ABC's Saturday morning cartoon line-up. After the original
series and the cartoon show went off the air, it would be two more
years before we'd hear a peep from the Bradys.
Once, twice, three times a Brady
Then the reincarnations began. The first, and most dreadful, was "The Brady Bunch Hour," which even Schwartz has trashed. "I had nothing to do with that," Schwartz said. "I didn't create it, I didn't write a word, I didn't have anything to do with it, except I hated it."
Schwartz said "The Brady Bunch Variety Hour" came about after an ABC executive saw Henderson and some of the other Brady kids on Sid and Marty Krofft's "Donny and Marie" variety show. The network wanted a Brady variety show, so the entire cast (minus Eve Plumb, who was replaced by Geri Reischl as Jan) returned for "The Brady Bunch Variety Hour," which was broadcast November 28, 1976 on ABC. That one outing served as the pilot for "The Brady Bunch Hour," which ran for eight episodes. Schwartz said Paramount never gave permission for the Bradys' foray into a variety show, but the studio was reluctant to sue ABC "because they were in bed with the network and had other things to sell them.
"We had discussions about [a lawsuit] but we decided [the show] would probably be a failure because it looked so awful," Schwartz said. "It was just so distorted from the Brady Bunch series that I just resented it and would have gladly burnt that celluloid."
It would be another four years before the Bradys would return to series television. What started out as a two-hour TV movie called "The Brady Girls Get Married" morphed into a short-run series called The Brady Brides. "We sold it as a two-hour special," Schwartz recalled, "but after [the network] saw the show and loved it, they said this is too good to kick away in one evening."
Schwartz was ordered to chop it into four pieces, which caused Sherwood and his son, Lloyd (his producing partner), to spend four days in an editing room trying to cut it into sensible, coherent episodes. The four episodes have since been put back together for subsequent airings on network TV and on Nick at Nite. Six more episodes were ordered and "The Brady Brides" project was born, but the honeymoon was short-lived (February-April 1981). "I was not pleased with it," Schwartz said. "I thought it was OK, but they insisted we stick extraneous characters in. We did not want Florence in and out of the show. We wanted two couples sharing the same house and the couple's problems. They felt we had to include Florence, Alice, and a child who had no place in the show at all."
The show's funniest moment came when Jan and Phillip arrived at the Brady homestead to announce their engagement, Carol said "We weren't doing anything important." To which Mike replied, "You don't consider reruns of Gilligan's Island important?" A ha-ha in-joke for those who know Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz also created "Gilligan's Island." It was probably even funnier for viewers who knew about the disdain actor Robert Reed had for such fluff. Schwartz said they originally didn't even plan to have Reed in "The Brady Girls Get Married."
"To our surprise he insisted in being in the show after five years of agony with him," Schwartz said. "He was actually in a Broadway play at the time and he had to leave the play for 5-6 days as I recall, fly back here, do this and give up whatever moneys he'd have been getting for the play to be their father. I said, 'You don't have to come back,' and he said, 'Are you kidding? No one's going to get those girls married except their father.' That was the last attitude I thought I'd get from him. Each time he came back it surprised me."
Another seven years would pass
before the gang returned for a two-hour movie, "A Very Brady
Christmas," which debuted December 18, 1988, on CBS. Everyone was
back except Susan Olsen (replaced by Jennifer Runyon as Cindy) and
now the clan had multiplied even further. Greg married his nurse,
Nora (Caryn Richman of "The New Gidget"); Peter was in love with his
boss; Marcia and Wally had two kids; Jan and Phillip were on the
verge of divorce; Sam dumped Alice; Bobby quit school to become a
race car driver; and Cindy, who was a college freshman in the 1981
reunion, was a college senior in 1988. She must have been on the
special seven-year plan. "That one I think was terrific," Schwartz
said. "We were able to give each of the kids a grown-up personality
stemming from the original and we tried to be honest about it. It all
seemed to evolve naturally."
Bradysomething
The ratings for that Yuletide special were better than anyone expected, so CBS ordered a new series that hit the air just a little over a year later, "The Bradys." "We wanted to treat the family more seriously," Schwartz said. "They had adult problems now." Schwartz said he was happy with the show, but blames its failure after six episodes on CBS' decision to air the show in the Friday 8 p.m. time slot up against ABC's successful comedy line-up. "We took the kids, who used to be kids, and treated them like grown-ups with grown-up problem. Maybe it was just unacceptable that way, but I'm positive that the time period had a great deal to do with it. Kids are not interested in these kinds of problems."
Again, due to bickering between Schwartz and Reed, papa Brady almost bought the farm. "We were going to have Mike accidentally killed in a helicopter accident," Schwartz told Elizabeth Moran in Bradymania. "As a city councilman, he was going to check out a fire to see if the fire department needed more backroads, and the helicopter [would go down]. Bob [Reed] didn't know about this. I was fed up with him. The story would go on with the kids trying to fix up their mother."
Once again, cancellation saved Mike Brady from death. Erin Smith said it was hard to accept The Bradys without the real Marcia Brady. "You had this feeling already that we were being betrayed," she said. "I remember thinking, how did Martha Quinn get this job? Couldn't I have been the next-door neighbor? The Christmas show succeeded because people hadn't seen them since the Brides, why they thought people would watch an hour-long drama...no one wants to see them in a drama."
Except for cast gatherings on talk shows, the Brady cast has yet to reunite for another television project as their characters. With the death of Robert Reed, that may never happen, but since they've replaced each of the Brady daughters at one time or another, anything is possible. Although when last quoted in newspaper articles and on talk shows, Eve Plumb refused to talk about "The Brady Bunch." "They take turns not doing something," Schwartz said of Plumb and her TV sister, Maureen McCormick, who has also been somewhat of a reluctant Brady in recent years.
While a Brady Bunch-based series hasn't been introduced since 1990, there have been plenty of Brady sightings on other TV shows before and since. Plumb appeared in the 1988 blaxploitation spoof "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka." And in 1989 Florence Henderson, Robert Reed, Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland, and a very pregnant Maureen McCormick appeared as their Brady selves in an episode of the NBC sitcom "Day By Day." The early '90s also produced "The Real Live Brady Bunch," a stage version of real episodes from the sitcom. It started in Chicago and moved to New York in 1992 before traveling to other cities. Melanie Hutsell played Jan in the stage show's first cast and went on to join the cast of "Saturday Night Live, "where she played Jan in a 1992 spoof that pitted the Bradys against The Partridge Family in a battle of the bands.
The Bradys hit the big screen in February 1995 with "The Brady Bunch Movie," starring a new cast as the Brady characters with cameos from some of the original cast members. "That was affectionate satire," Schwartz said of the film. "We weren't making serious fun, not black satire. We loved them, we still love them, but we know what we're doing here. That was the tone we wanted -- Mr. Brady's over-long lectures, everybody was a little over-the-top, but the aim was to keep it affectionate or we would have lost the audience who loved it. You can't destroy the people and expect the audience to like it."
But earlier drafts of the script called for just that. "They were really travesties," Schwartz said. "They were beyond parody. As I once put into a memo, it was like somebody wrote the script with an axe, chopping all the characters to pieces. I think we achieved that balance."
"The Brady Bunch Movie" led to other TV specials, including Nick At Nite's hilarious "Brady: An American Chronicle," a spoof of the PBS Ken Burns documentary "The Civil War." In May, 1995, Susan Olsen produced "Brady Bunch Home Movies" for CBS. That same month, members of the "The Brady Bunch Movie" cast appeared on the sitcom "Wings" as their Brady characters in a pointless dream sequence.
The entire cast from the first "Brady Bunch" movie returned for 1996's "A Very Brady Sequel," which featured a trip to Hawaii (just like in the TV series) and the return of Carol's first husband (played by Tim Matheson). "Alice, this is Carol's first husband, Roy," Mr. Brady said as an introduction. "He's not dead like we'd thought." Roy was out to steal the family treasure, the horse statue located beneath the stairs that's been in the background on the set of the Brady house in almost every incarnation.
