From a steamy on-set romance to an ill-fated variety show,
The Brady Bunch was one of those TV families that always kept our interest. But when you
pull back the curtains of this iconic show, a lot of what you find comes as a surprise.
In the 1950s and 1960s, family sitcoms were almost always about the traditional nuclear family
unit — a man married to a woman raising their shared biological children. In the real world,
the definition and makeup of the American family was evolving, and it was a brief,
statistical mention of that in the Los Angeles Times that inspired Sherwood
Schwartz to create the show that would become The Brady Bunch. Schwartz told Brady World in 1998:
"It said that year, 1965, 31% of all marriages involved people who had a
child or children from a previous marriage. It indicated a remarkable sociological change in
our country. 31% is approximately one-third of all marriages. That's a huge statistic."
Sure, a show reflecting a progressive reality was an angle, but Schwartz,
a veteran radio and TV sitcom writer,
realized such a familial dynamic offered ample plot potential. Schwartz told Brady World:
"Not only could there be sibling rivalries,
but there could be cross sibling rivals. And the problems each parent would have
trying to convince the 'new' children that they loved them just as much as their own."
In hammering out an outline for this theoretical series,
Schwartz also wrote out a theme song that would explain the somewhat complicated setup
of the show. Not only did that turn into the universally known theme song from The
Brady Bunch, but it ensured that Schwartz wouldn't have to script much exposition.
Sherwood Schwartz went about selling The Brady Bunch in 1965, approaching all three American
TV networks, according to Brady World. First up was NBC, whose programming executives saw
promise in the idea, but hated the ending of the pilot, in which the newlywed Mike and Carol Brady
feel weird and lonely on their honeymoon, so they go back and retrieve their six children.
"How would you girls like to come along with us?"
"On your honeymoon?"
"That's right."
NBC thought it was far-fetched that a just-wed couple would make their honeymoon a family
vacation, and Schwartz countered that the gesture would endear them to audiences
"for showing that kind of concern," as he told Brady World. Since he wouldn't change the twist,
NBC passed on The Brady Bunch. Schwartz also refused to make changes requested
by CBS personnel, who wanted him to lead up to the marriage of Mike and
Carol in the sixth or seventh episode, rather than putting it in the pilot.
Schwartz's third and final stop: ABC. At the time,
the network was pioneering a movie-of-the-week concept,
and wanted Schwartz to rewrite his pilot into a 90-minute telefilm. He recalled to Brady World:
"I told them I couldn't make my half-hour script
last for an hour and a half without making it duller."
ABC passed too, but they approached Schwartz more than two years later with an offer. The
success of the 1968 movie Yours, Mine and Ours created a vogue for shows about blended families,
and ABC bought The Brady Bunch, which, oddly enough, was originally titled Yours and Mine.
While all nine main cast members of The Brady Bunch will be most
closely associated with the roles they played on the 1969 to 1974 series,
it's important to remember that Barry Williams is not really Greg Brady. Maureen McCormick
also wasn’t his stepsister or the late Florence Henderson actually his stepmother. Otherwise,
Williams' off-screen, romantic dalliances could be considered somewhat incestuous.
In her book Here's the Story McCormick wrote that she and Williams "couldn't hold
back" their attraction any longer and while shooting some episodes in Hawaii in 1972,
shared their first kiss. Williams wrote in Growing Up Brady that after the Hawaii jaunt,
he and McCormick would sneak away to his dressing room and make out during shooting breaks.
According to producer Sherwood Schwartz,
the sexual tension between the two actors was so palpable while shooting a scene for
the 1973 episode "Room at the Top" that he had to physically distance the duo.
In Growing Up Brady, Williams revealed that early in the show's run, he harbored
a crush on his TV mom, and although at the time Henderson was a married woman,
she agreed to go out on a date with her young co-star.
"I was always attracted to her."
He took her out for an innocent night at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles.
In the 1973 episode "The Cincinnati Kids," the Bradys visit Kings Island, a newly opened Ohio
theme park. According to Kings Island Central, the episode was essentially an advertisement —
producer Paramount was a primary shareholder in Taft Broadcasting, Kings Island's parent company.
"So we were on all the rides and saw all the backstage things and had a really wonderful time."
One scene called for the cast to enjoy the park's signature gigantic wooden roller
coaster. According to Barry Williams' Growing Up Brady, the crew planned to mount a camera on the
front of the ride, then point it into the cars to film the real reactions of the Brady Bunch actors
during the experience. Technicians put the camera on a platform, affixed it to the ride, and were
ready to go, until cast member Robert Reed refused to continue. Reed recalled in Growing Up Brady:
"I'm thinking to myself, 'When that thing gets going at 60 miles an hour,
I'm not sure that whole rig's gonna clear all the overhead stuff on the tracks.'"
After observing the tracks, he saw "several places where it would never get through," according to
Growing Up Brady. He pointed this out and made his reservations known. To ease Reed's nerves,
producer Lloyd Schwartz ordered a test run of the coaster with the mounted rig in place,
but without the actors on board. The coaster car made a circuit of the
ride and returned without the camera, which had broken off along the way,
proving Reed correct and probably saving the cast from serious injuries or worse.
The pilot episode of The Brady Bunch introduced 11 characters — the eight Bradys,
housekeeper Alice, and two pets: the girls' cat, Fluffy, and the boys' dog, Tiger.
"Tiger! You brought Tiger? He'll frighten Fluffy to death."
Fluffy never appeared or was mentioned on the show ever again, while Tiger
appeared in seven episodes from 1969 to 1971 before disappearing from the Bradys' world.
In that limited time, multiple dogs played Tiger. A pup named Chip got the role in the pilot,
but producers contracted with a different animal casting supplier, necessitating a new dog to
play Tiger, one actually named Tiger. One day, Tiger wasn't responding to commands and wouldn't
do what was asked of him by the trainer. When questioned after the scene was finally captured,
the trainer admitted that Tiger wasn't acting well because it was a completely
different dog than who'd been appearing in The Brady Bunch up to that point. The
previous Tiger had tragically been struck and killed by a truck the night before.
The Brady Bunch is one of the most enduring television shows of all time, with reruns popping
up regularly in daytime and weekend time slots on local TV stations and cable networks for more
than four decades. Neither its omnipresence in the years after it was a show on ABC's primetime
schedule, nor its status as a moving time capsule of early 1970s pop culture, should be considered
proof of its ongoing popularity, however, because in its original run the show wasn't much of a hit.
The sitcom never placed in the list of the top 30 most-watched TV shows in any of its five years.
In the 1969-1970 TV season, it ranked 56th, topped out at 31st place in the 1971-72 season,
and then finally to 54th in 1973-74. As far as ABC was concerned, a 54th place ranking wasn't
good enough to earn a 6th-season renewal. After 117 episodes, ABC canceled The Brady
Bunch, preventing the cast and writers from delivering a proper, closure-providing finale.
As The Brady Bunch lived on in syndicated reruns, it grew in stature and popularity. By 1976,
only two years after its only moderately popular first run,
the audience was seemingly ready for a "Brady" revival. Rather than reboot the sitcom,
ABC brought back The Brady Bunch with The Brady Bunch Variety Hour. The new show was
a bright and garish musical comedy variety show in which the cast members from the comedy sang,
danced, performed in sketches, goofed around a swimming pool, and welcomed celebrity guests.
Not everybody was keen on the idea. Eve Plumb, the original Jan Brady, opted out of the series,
telling the News Citizen that she wanted to "grow both professionally and personally."
Audiences didn't particularly enjoy The Brady Bunch Variety Hour either — it finished 51st in
the TV ratings for the 1976-77 season and was canceled after nine episodes.
Future revivals would adhere closer to the original series' format. The 1981 TV movie
The Brady Girls Get Married found Jan and Marcia marrying their husbands in
their parents' backyard. The film also led to the short-lived 1981 sitcom The Brady Brides,
in which Jan, Marcia, and their husbands all live together in one house.
The whole bunch would come back again in 1988 with the holiday TV movie A Very Brady Christmas, which
scored such monster ratings that CBS commissioned a new series called The Bradys. Debuting in 1990,
it lasted just five episodes, probably because it was starkly different from the cornball silliness
of The Brady Bunch. In the soapy drama, all the Brady kids are grown up and face very
adult problems — Bobby almost dies in a pro race car crash, Peter is in an abusive relationship,
Jan has trouble conceiving a child, and Marcia struggles with alcoholism.
As Happy Days begat Laverne and Shirley and All in the Family spurred Maude, The Brady
Bunch's sole attempt at fictional universe building was a project called Kelly's Kids.
An episode of The Brady Bunch by that name ran in the middle of the show's fifth and final season,
featuring Ken and Kathy Kelly, a couple that is friends with Mike and Carol Brady. They adopt a
boy named Matt, and when he admits he misses his two best friends from the orphanage, Dwayne and
Carey, the Kellys adopt them as well. According to Richard Irvin's Spinning Laughter, the fact that
the three boys were all of different ethnicities was a crucial element devised by creator Sherwood
Schwartz, as he wanted a subtle way to support racial integration and representation in the show.
The "backdoor pilot," wherein a sample episode of a new show airs as an installment of the mother
series, didn't work as planned — ABC didn't order any more of Kelly's Kids. However,
Schwartz didn't give up on the idea, and in 1986 CBS picked up a season of Together We Stand,
a sitcom about a couple adopting a multicultural brood of kids.
"This show has a life of its own. The Brady family is a part of Americana."
According to Sherwood and Lloyd Schwartz's Brady Brady Brady, the cast and crew of The
Brady Bunch entertained the idea that the show would get renewed for a sixth season. Such a
move would have required renegotiating contracts with the actors, and Sherwood Schwartz thought
that would be a good time to part ways with Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady.
Schwartz called Reed's agent, Merritt Blake, in 1974 to inform him that his
client's services would no longer be required in a still-hypothetical season
six. Blake seemingly assumed that Mike Brady would be eliminated from The Brady Bunch,
but that wouldn't be the case. According to Brady Brady Brady, Schwartz recalled saying:
"I didn't say Mr. Brady wouldn't be coming back. I just said Robert wouldn't.
Robert has made it plain that he has been unhappy with the limitations of the role."
According to Barry Williams' Growing Up Brady, appalled by what he considered the poor writing
quality of the series that he repeatedly fired off scathing memos picking the script apart, and
then sent them to the producers. For 1974's "The Hair-Brained Scheme," what would turn out to be
the final episode of The Brady Bunch, Reed refused to act in it altogether. Immediately responding to
the news that Mike Brady would be recast, Blake suggested another of his clients, John McMartin.
He wouldn't get the role, nor would anyone, because that sixth season was never ordered.