With ‘The Brady Bunch’ Turning 50 This Year, Go Behind the Scenes of Every ‘Brady’ Series

‘The Brady Bunch’ (1969-74)

Our first opportunity to meet the Bradys: Robert Reed (Mike), Florence Henderson (Carol), Barry Williams (Greg), Maureen McCormick (Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!), Christopher Knight (Peter), Eve Plumb (Jan), Mike Lookinland (Bobby), Susan Oliver (Cindy), and Ann B. Davis (Alice). We’d tell you who played Cousin Oliver, but nobody likes Cousin Oliver. Okay, fine, quit whining. It was Robbie Rist. For sure, this show is pure saccharine in its humor and its “drama,” but it’s the earnestness of it all that’s so endearing, along with the little life lessons.

“The original series is where it all began. The Brady Bunch has been a representation of American ’70s pop culture ever since,” observes Erika Woehlk. “One interesting item I learned when researching Bradypedia was that the original script for The Brady Bunch included just two children, not six. It wasn’t until several drafts later that more kids were added into the mix. It could have been a very different (and probably much less dynamic) show with just Bobby and Cindy! Before Season Three began, ABC sent out a press release teasing that Mike and Carol were going to have a baby together. I don’t know the reason, but we all know that didn’t happen. I have heard there was even a script written.”

‘The Brady Kids’ (1972-73)

Back in the 1970s, there was a period where it seemed like almost every prime-time show was getting an animated version of itself, and The Brady Bunch was no exception. While the live action show was still on ABC, the kids voiced their cartoon counterparts as they got in all sorts of adventures. Oh, and those adventures included a mynah bird named Marlon, who spoke and happened to be a wizard (don’t ask us); their dog Mop Top (which raised the question of what had happened to their live-action dog Tiger, who mysteriously disappeared), and a pair of panda cubs named Ping and Pong. In two separate episodes, they also randomly met Superman and Wonder Woman. The ’70s was a strange time.

Notes Erika, “The Brady Kids was the first animated television appearance of Wonder Woman, and there was a lawsuit involving three of the child actors that resulted in them dropping their voices from the series in the second season. The first season of The Brady Kids ran just in the fall of 1972 for 17 episodes. The folks at Filmation Studios wanted at least five more episodes to be produced so that the total number would be 22: the minimum required to go into syndication. But Filmation had a problem. The kids were being encouraged — rightly or wrongfully — by their manager to demand more money. Filmation did not want to pay up. In the end, Eve, Mike, and Susan stuck with the show, due mostly to the encouragement of their parents. Barry, Maureen, and Chris opted out. So the studio got three other voice talents (two of whom were the producer’s children!) to be Greg, Marcia, and Peter for the remaining five episodes. After the 22nd episode was completed, the show was canceled.

“Barry, Maureen, and Chris all canceled their contracts with Filmation in July 1973. For the first season, they had been paid $138 per episode, plus $127.65 bonus. That’s not much considering the going rate for actors and voice actors at the time. So Barry and Chris sued Filmation in October 1973. As part of the suit, they accused the studio of using their likenesses without their permission. The animated characters were drawn to look like the real-life actors, plus they were drawn to look like the characters of Greg and Peter as portrayed by Barry and Chris. Therefore, the plaintiffs alleged that Filmation was using them illegally and the two boys were suing for damages and equitable pay. It would be five years before the case was finally settled in Barry and Chris’ favor.”

‘The Peter Sterne Amateur Hour’ (Jan. 26, 1973)

We’ll grant you that this is an odd one to include, but we do so for a reason. In episode 16 of Season 4 (“Amateur Night”), the Brady kids decide to enter a singing competition to raise money to pay for a silver platter for their parents’ anniversary (awwwww). They sing and dance their way to what becomes something of a second career as the cast began recording a series of albums, and even performed at some sold out concerts. And it gave the world the song “It’s a Sunshine Day”. It even set the stage (see what we did there?) for the next live-action Brady series.

‘Kelly’s Kids’ (Jan. 4, 1974)

This was a proposed spin-off that aired as a part of The Brady Bunch‘s final season. The idea was that Ken and Kathy Kelly (Ken Berry and Brooke Bundy), friends of Mike and Carol Brady, adopted three orphan boys from different racial backgrounds and the show would have followed the challenges of that. One of the kids was played by Bobby Brady….uh, Mike Lookinland’s… brother, Todd.

Erika explains, “No network picked up the series at that point. Over ten years later, though, Sherwood Schwartz is able to reformulate it and sell it as Together We Stand. The show was a half-hour sitcom starring Elliott Gould as the father and Dee Wallace as the mother. One of the kids was played by Jonathan Ke Quan, the young actor who is known for Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies. The series lasted 19 episodes. They killed off Gould’s character in a car accident, leaving the mom and three children alone. Not really comedy material, that.”

‘The Brady Bunch Variety Hour’ (1976-77

Check out the concept of this one: ABC chooses the Bradys to star in a new variety show. They must have seen the episode “Amateur Hour” and was impressed. To do so, Mike gives up his career in architecture and moves the family to Southern California. There would be guest stars, skits, music numbers, and then a look at the Brady bunch at home. The only cast member who chose not to return was Eve Plumb, who was replaced (but not in our hearts) as Jan by Geri Reischl. The seeds for this show were actually planted when then ABC president Fred Silverman reunited the cast for an episode of the Donny & Marie show, which turned out to be such a ratings success that he spun the Bradys off into their own show. Nine episodes in all were produced.

While Closerweekly.com had previously provided an in depth look at The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, Lloyd points out that the show was produced without he or his father, Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz, being involved. This is because Paramount Pictures owns the copyright to the concept outright (as opposed to Gilligan’s Island, which the Schwartz family are co-owners of with Warner Bros). “First we read that the Brady Bunch cast was going to be on the Donny & Marie show, which was fine, but then we read that it was picked up as a variety show, and we had nothing to do with it.”

“I saw half of one,” he continues, “and never looked at it again. It was just ridiculous both in terms of the humor and the whole concept, because, you know, there’s no one that knows singing and dancing as well as Robert Reed, right?”

‘The Brady Girls Get Married’ (1981)

“The entire cast reunited for what began as a TV movie (The Brady Girls Get Married) about a double wedding for Marcia and Jan,” details Erika. “It’s 1981, a few years after the failed Variety Hour experiment. This is the first time we see the Brady family in their typical setting: in other words, not animated, singing or dancing. The kids are grown. Some have careers, and it’s interesting what the writers picked for them. Marcia is a fashion designer. We’re not told what Jan’s profession is (in The Brady Brides we learn she’s an architect, following in Mike’s footsteps). Cindy is a freshman in college and Bobby is a sophomore. Peter has joined the Air Force, and Greg is in an obstetrics residency, having just finished medical school.

“The biggest revelation, I think, is that Carol Brady now has a job! All the kids have left the nest. Alice is no longer living with the Bradys either (she married Sam the butcher!). That leaves Mike and Carol alone in a large home. Florence Henderson had advocated during the original series for Carol to get a job, but was always denied. (That was during the women’s liberation movement, remember.) She — Florence — didn’t feel comfortable acting as a housewife, especially one who had a full-time woman on staff to take care of everything. Now that it’s 1981, though, Carol is gainfully employed as a real estate agent.

“The Brady Girls also introduces viewers to an expanding Brady family. For the first time, we get to meet spouses. The whole idea of this TV movie, after all, is to get Marcia and Jan married. So they do. Marcia marries a guy named Wally Logan, who’s got a sense of humor and works for a toy company. Jan marries a straight-laced professor named Phillip Covington, III. All of this serves as a prelude to the next spin-off, a half-hour comedy called The Brady Brides.”

‘The Brady Brides’ (1981)

Just two weeks after The Brady Girls Get Married aired a new series starring the Brady family debuted. It features Marcia and Jan and their new spouses Wally and Phillip. Cindy, the Brady boys, and Mike never make appearances in this series. Carol and Alice are the only other ones with screen time. It’s a bit more focused in that way than any other series. The idea for the show actually began six years prior with Sherwood Schwartz. It was called Full House and featured two married couples living together in order to save on living expenses. Schwartz was never able to sell it, however, his son Lloyd came up with the idea to make the two couples the Brady girls and somehow that worked. NBC picked it up. I actually really enjoyed this series. It’s too bad it only lasted seven episodes. It had some good laughs. The actors who played Wally and Phillip were great.”

Producer Lloyd J. Schwartz notes that there is a perception on some people’s parts that The Brady Brides was a failure, but, he points out to us, that wasn’t the case. “It was actually winning,” he says. “It followed Harper Valley P.T.A., which I also created. They aired back-to-back and were the only things doing well on NBC at the time. But what happened was new management came in and it certainly wasn’t Grant Tinker’s kind of show, so that was the end of it.”

‘A Very Brady Christmas’ (1988)

This time Susan Olsen was the no-show (something about being on a honeymoon), so she was replaced by Jennifer Runyon. The rest of the Bradys were joined by Jan and Marcia’s husbands, played by Ron Kuhlman and Jerry Houser. This deals with Mike and Carol paying to have the kids, in-laws, grandkids and pretty much everyone else to come together for the Christmas holiday, though it turns out that everyone is dealing with far more adult problems than they did when they were younger. It was odd seeing the Bunch dipping its toe into (sometimes overly) dramatic material. The TV movie was a massive success, and like every other time a Brady reunion scored, someone thought it was a good idea to turn it back into a new series.

“What I liked about it was that the family grew quite a bit, just like any real-life family would,” opines Erika. “Greg is married to Nora and they have one child, Kevin. Marcia and Jan are still with Wally and Phillip. Marcia and Wally have two children, Jessica and Mickey. Peter gets engaged to Valerie during the movie. Bobby and Cindy are still single. It’s a good holiday special where the whole family comes back to the remodeled Brady residence for Christmas. The house is kind of like a character, and it jarring to see the late 80s-style renovations: glass brick windows where the stained glass used to be, a white kitchen, different furniture, etc. But its bones were still there and in that sense, it still felt like home. Aside from the super-cheesy ending, the one thing I didn’t like about this movie was what they did to poor Alice. She gets a note written on butcher paper from her husband Sam saying that he’s leaving her for a much younger woman. It’s a cruel thing to do, even to a fictional character. It’s just cold, Sam. Meat locker cold.”

‘Day by Day’ (Feb. 5, 1989)

The show is about a married couple who give up their careers to run a day care center out of their house. One episode has their son imagining himself as one of the Bradys, which presented a great opportunity to make fun of some of the show’s cliches thanks to the guest appearance of Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Ann B. Davis, Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland, and Maureen McCormick.

‘The Bradys’ (1990)

While A Very Brady Christmas had dabbled in drama, this show went for broke.. and broke, after five episodes. The plots were far more serious than any fans of the Bunch had seen before, but the biggest problem was likely that its ratings butt was being kicked by the one-two punch of Full House (how rude!) and Family Matters.

“What we wanted to do was not what they did, which is The Bradys series,” notes Lloyd. “What we wanted to do was just one or two movies a year and just stop in and see the Brady family. But CBS said a series is where the money is, and you can’t fight that. So it became The Bradys series, which I’m not unhappy with. I just thought they put it on at the wrong time. Also, it didn’t have young kids in it and it was not conceived for the time slot they were putting it.”

Adds Erika, “Ah, where to begin? This is a one-hour drama that lasted a scant five episodes in 1990. It’s very poorly conceived. No one wants to see the Bradys in an un-Brady-like way. Let me give you a few examples. They turn Marcia into a drunk and her husband is chronically unemployed. Peter is a philanderer who’s been engaged four times. Jan and Phillip have marriage trouble they try to solve by adopting a child. Bobby is paralyzed in a race car accident. Yes, folks, it happened. Why? Well, the whole Brady franchise was bought by CBS. Given the success of A Very Brady Christmas, their purchase could have turned out to be a decent milk cow for the network. They wanted to rejigger it into something new and fresh. Well, hindsight is 20:20. They certainly learned an important lesson: not to mess with a successful formula of feel-good, largely undramatic, apolitical television when it comes to the Bradys.

“Mike Brady decides to become a local politician and run for City Council. The Brady house is moved from its address at 4222 Clinton Way to a new, undisclosed location in the same city. So not only has the Brady family itself changed, so has their whole world. It’s no surprise that it only lasted five episodes. Had it gone on longer, here’s what could have happened. Mike Brady would have been killed in a helicopter accident. Carol would become distraught and run off to a ski lodge by herself. Jan gets pregnant. Cindy’s Jewish boyfriend Gary would propose to her, but the couple and Gary’s two children would be confronted by Cindy’s great-aunt Bridget who, apparently, is a staunch anti-Semite. All I can say is I’m glad it ended when it did. Thankfully, we never had to watch Carol sing at Mike’s funeral.”

It’s Lloyd’s feeling that the more dramatic approach was a sound one. “They had kids, and they were kids who became adults and have adult problems,” he says. “There was no other way to do that on a continuing basis.”

‘Brady Time’ / ‘Brady Machine’ — The “Lost” Series (1990)

This one was a revelation for us. Details Erika, “It’s 1990 and all the ‘real’ spin-offs have been filmed. Sherwood [Schwartz] decides to pitch the idea of his own Brady-related cartoon series to networks. This one is different than The Brady Kids that aired back in the 1970s. Brady Time is proposed as an animated show featuring all nine main cast members of the original series as cartoon characters. The family has a time machine that can transport them back in time and all across the world. The kicker is that when they go back in time, they have to blend in with the locals. ‘When the Brady family is in Japan, they look Japanese; when they’re in Egypt, they look Egyptian; when they’re in Brazil, they look South American,’ Sherwood wrote. ‘When they are in the past, the Bradys attempt to live like the locals. Hence, the series is intended to be educational.’

“Sherwood pitched the idea to DIC Entertainment along with another cartoon — this one a feature film or television movie — called The Shadow That Ran Away. DIC is the company that gave us Inspector Gadget and The Super Mario Brothers. They must have passed on Sherwood’s shows.”

‘The Brady Bunch Movie’ (1995)

In many ways a parody of the original series, the cast absolutely nails their characters of the Bradys, with extra praise paid to Gary Cole and Shelley Long as Mike and Carol, Christopher Daniel Barnes (the star of Day by Day who imagined himself a Brady on that show — what an audition) as Greg, and Christine Taylor as Marcia. The approach the film took is that it may be the ’90s, but the Brady family is living as though it’s still the 1970s. That may sound dopey, but it plays really well.

‘A Very Brady Sequel’ (1996)

While still enjoyable, the joke had already started to wear a little thin by this second film. The plot has a guy claiming to be Carol’s long missing ex-husband showing up and throwing the household into such disarray that even Alice may have a hard time keeping things steady. The returning cast did save the day with their humorous performances.

‘The Brady Bunch in the White House’ (2002)

This TV movie had Gary Cole’s Mike Brady becoming President of the United States with Shelley Long’s Carol as First Lady. The duo have to learn how to balance the responsibilities of government with their responsibility as parents. The film is not good, although when considering the state of the union today, the idea of Mike Brady becoming president may not be as ridiculous as it once seemed.

‘A Very Brady Renovation’ (2019)

While we’d taken an exclusive inside look at the new HGTV series chronicling the transformation of the home that was the exterior of the house on The Brady Bunch into a duplicate of the interior as well, the network has released a description of their new online series, Building Brady.

“Construction is underway at The Brady Bunch house and HGTV’s digital platforms now offer an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at every step of the renovation. The network has launched its “Brady Renovation Central” at HGTV.com/Brady where fans can find in-depth articles, exciting video content, photo galleries, show updates and more. The site also offers early looks at The Brady Bunch home renovation in a digital video series, Building Brady. New installments were uploaded weekly—as well as to the A Very Brady Renovation Facebook Watch page — and will offer a glimpse of the full series which premieres in a couple of months. The digital series documents the special moments between the Brady TV siblings Barry Williams (Greg), Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Christopher Knight (Peter), Eve Plumb (Jan), Mike Lookinland (Bobby), and Susan Olsen (Cindy); and HGTV stars Jonathan and Drew Scott (Property Brothers), Mina Starsiak and Karen E Laine (Good Bones), siblings Leanne and Steve Ford (Restored by the Fords), Jasmine Roth (Hidden Potential) and Lara Spencer (Flea Market Flip).

‘The Brady Bunch: Shipwrecked!’

There was, as Lloyd explains it, yet another Brady TV movie that went unfilmed. “Long after A Very Brady Christmas, they wanted a show where the Brady Bunch gets shipwrecked,” he says. “This was a direct order by Jeff Zucker, who was then president of NBC. So I go to the meeting and I said, ‘What you want is the Brady bunch from a long time ago to get shipwrecked. But Cindy is no longer seven, and it’s not going to be this cute thing that you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘Well, this is what I want,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to do it.’ It was just a crazy idea.’ Now if they wanted to do a movie, I had an idea for one.”

“Chris Knight and Barry Williams get a call from the network about a Brady movie,” he continues the scenario. “And so they as themselves go, and so do Maureen McCormick and Florence Henderson (Bob Reed had died by then), and Anne was alive. The idea is they would go to everybody in their real lives and we’d get a little bit of a sense of that as they’re all convinced to come back and do this movie. Toward the end of the movie, they come onto the set and the Brady Bunch set is being rebuilt. They pick up a script and they read it, and comment that it’s too bad dad is in Peru and can’t be with them. They look at the ridiculousness of this, because he had died, and they said they didn’t really want to do it. You cut back and they’re gone. The network comes in looking for them and there’s just a sign that says, ‘Sorry,’ and they’ve all gone to the beach and are having a great time.

“I was making fun of the network,” Lloyd laughs, “and they weren’t too pleased with that sense of humor. And I said, ‘That’s the movie I can do for you, but I can’t do that other movie.'”

In the end, nobody did.