Christopher Knight Shares His Memories on 50 Years of ‘The Brady Bunch’ (Exclusive)

Do you ever feel like Michael Corleone in the ‘Godfather’ films in that every time you think you’re out, they pull you back in, in terms of the Bradys?

I made peace with this quite a while ago, so it’s not like I look at it like pulling me back in. It’s almost as though I laugh at it. It’s like a seven-year cycle where it cycles out, cycles back. This — the HGTV reality show — I think is the last cycle and it’s a wonderful birthday gift, a celebration of sorts; an acknowledgement that the history of the show has grown to mean more than just a television show. It represents a piece of Americana and a piece of what America wants to believe it is. It’s a reflection of an inner feeling of the American family and that’s good. That puts us in a favorable position. Frankly, the show at the time it was produced, was already the past. That type of family, that type of unity, though still in existence, it’s quite a bit different during the late 60s. If it’s bad now, it was worse then politically and socially. You wouldn’t know it from the The Brady Bunch, and the household that we were depicting really was a throwback to the late 50s, early 60s.

Then what’s your feeling about that aspect of the show?

There was some brilliance in that, because maybe it’ll never be that again. There’s going to be a lot more cynicism and sarcasm in any comedy if it’s to work for today, because the simplicity of the Bradys is for children, similar in the way that Santa Claus works for children. It’s something that parents jump in with and enjoy with their children. Similarly to that, the Bradys is for the parent that kind of connects back to their youth. There’s a similarity with the way that they viewed the world as a youth and certainly at four you’re not aware of the social ramifications or geopolitical issues. I know growing up I was surprised at the economic realities of our family, because that’s not where a child operates, right? A child doesn’t really have an idea of what massive amounts of resources are versus just enough resources. It’s a simpler time, and that’s what the Bradys represent. It’s not like it’s going to get pushed off the shelf. It’s almost as though that conveyor belt stopped and it locked up and that is the epitome, the last of its type. Everything else now is more cynical and it’s more sarcastic, but funnier.

Although there are a lot of people who feel that ‘The Brady Bunch’ is funny in its own right.

Our show wasn’t essentially funny, but it was for four, five, seven and eight-year-olds. Kids like to watch kids. Today you would find that in a cartoon or like a Hallmark Santa. It’s more of a Hallmark version of family, but that’s great, because that’s what kids want and that’s what parents want for their kids. Unless you’re Joan Crawford, you want to keep that world at bay from your child. Allowing the Bradys to touch your children at five, six and seven is something you want to do versus perhaps something else that might “wake” them up a little bit too early. Even if you’re not a fan of that kind of simplicity, there’s nothing harmful in watching the Bradys. It becomes a cloud, a safe place to go. It’s like an old sweatshirt of sorts. The fact that it comes back every seven years makes sense, because it keeps getting recycled. Parents remember it, they remember it fondly. It reminds them of what they say is a simpler time, but I would imagine any adult, no matter what era they were born in, looks back at their childhood as a simpler time. Unless they were really confused. Maybe I’m naive there. Today, society’s made growing up a lot easier than it used to be.

You talk about ‘The Brady Bunch’ representing the last vestige of that type of show, but what’s interesting is that it was pushing up against the transformation of the medium with shows like ‘MASH’ and ‘All in the Family.’

We were probably well placed in the week, but we struggled to stay on. We probably had 40 million people watching us, but the available audience was like 180 million or something like that back then. Maybe 200 million. We were pulling 30 shares and getting up to 40 million people viewing us, which would be an audience today you would die for, but we weren’t a top 20 show. We were a top 30 show, top 40 show, but the cutoff really was stay close to the high twenties, thirties, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to stay on. You drop below that and they’ll look for something stronger to put on the air. We won our time slot for a number of years. First time that ABC had done that. We were lucky in that we were on ABC. ABC at the time wasn’t a brand new network, but it wasn’t thought of in the same way that NBC and CBS, who had a much longer legacy. ABC was relatively new and not in all markets yet. We were with an upstart network that hadn’t yet fully fledged itself.

On Friday night, we found a home. Kids were home and we ended up winning the night for ABC — first time ABC would win a night. It was soon after that that they would then rule the day on Monday night because of football. It was creative programming, but it wasn’t scripted stuff. But as a child’s show we could win Friday night, though I doubt we could win any other night. What’s interesting is that the counter programming that finally caused us to leave the air was Sanford and Son, which wasn’t really the same audience at all.

Not even sure you can call that counter-programming, really.

But you can see that adults controlled television at that point and suddenly there was something more adult to watch. Anyway, five years wasn’t a bad run, but other than, I think, our fourth season, we were picked up for half seasons at a time. It was never like, “You’re doing so well, we’ll pick you up for an entire 22 episodes.” Instead, it was, “We’ll pick you up for 13, we’ll pick you up for another nine, we’ll pick you up for 13, we’ll pick you for another 10” depending on the year. It was always that. Then, after five years, frankly, I’m glad that it ended when it ended, because of where I was in my life. And the show was hard to do as I was getting older, because it needed to deal with things that weren’t important to me anymore. That seemed old to me, because it was a child show. They were looking for ways of fixing the aging arc of the stars of the show and growing out of the audience that the show needed to play to.

Weren’t there two casts being considered based on whether or not Robert Reed would do the show?

Yes. Joyce Bullifant was the other mom of Sherwood’s cast. Bob Reed came with four brunette boys if he signed on. In the event that he didn’t, they had  James Franciscus with three blonde boys. Joyce was the mom as a dark-haired woman with brunette girls. He had inverted the cast dependent upon where Bob Reed fell. Bob Reed didn’t want to do the show. They were throwing it to him because he was already an Emmy-nominated actor for The Defenders, but then the show was canceled. Bob was a hot commodity; he had taken over for Robert Redford on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park and from that he got The Defenders and was well regarded for that. Then Barefoot in the Park was coming to television and Bob was going to play the role, but they decided to make it an African-American cast. Bob was obviously out and free, but that was Paramount that made the change in casting. So the other thing they asked him to do was The Brady Bunch. He was a wonderful person, but traditional type family wasn’t his arc.

None of it spoke to him outside of the fact that it was the big payday. It was weird coming from this show, which had no budget, but somehow Paramount had to pay him that because they owed it to him for his deal that went south on Barefoot in the Park. I’m not privy to any of the business machinations there, but freeing him up to do this is what led them to believe they could get him, but in the event that ultimately he couldn’t be convinced, they had this other cast.

It’s amazing he did it, given how much he seemed to hate filming the show.

He had a love/hate relationship with it. He didn’t respect the show. He didn’t respect [series creator] Sherwood Schwartz. Sherwood created out of a completely different place. There was really no character there and Bob was an actor. He liked to dissect the character and build a life that made sense, and it had to hang together. Of course, Bob was making this project much too serious. He didn’t know how else to work, but his frustrations were able to be lived out, I guess. Not that I ever saw it. I never knew anything about their contempt for one another until I became an adult and would read about it and heard about it, because then adult issues and concepts were shared; they weren’t as a child. They did a really good job of keeping it between them. If there was tension, I wouldn’t even recognize it. It didn’t raise the level to what I understood as a fight. Why he did it, it’s anyone’s guess. I do know that ultimately — and it didn’t take very long — he really took to all of us and became a guardian, a protector artistically. It was from him as a child that I learned that I had a point of view that mattered.

Earlier you were alluding to the fact that you, in a sense, eventually outgrew the show?

Ultimately it was the simplicity that even I as a child, or a teenager more so, was having a hard time with, because it really wasn’t my kind of thing. The fact is that my dad was an actor and my mom was an artist and they both squarely sat on the side of art, which is where Bob was coming from. Not that I knew that they necessarily supported Bob’s opinion. I didn’t even know he had these issues against Sherwood. But my mom always used the word banal to describe it and she hated the show. I grew up in this crosscurrent myself where the show was “beneath us.” At the same time, and we come full circle, I surrendered to the concept of not running from it long ago in my twenties. There’s some that are still running from it for their reasons, but I got past that. But I thought at one point it was something I needed to really get away from if I wanted to be an actor and be an artist. Then it would continue to raise its head through my young adult rebel years. And then I realized, wait a second, this thing could be around after me. It’s in every room before me and it’s in the room after me. How do I make peace with that without having to ignore it? It’s like cutting off your arm. It comes with you. So what’s the big deal? Why am I trying to run from this so much? Then with that peace comes the seven-year cycle of reunions and it just tickles me.

But there can’t be another Brady reunion. There’s nothing we could do. We couldn’t service the brand. We’re too old at this point. One thing you learn in this business is it’s for people that help the audience reflect kindly upon themselves and through you — they will do that or they won’t. If you’ve grown up with them and you’re no longer what they envisioned you to be, you won’t. If you’ve grown up into something that is something new, but something acceptable, that’s good. At a certain age it just doesn’t work anymore, especially when it’s a good show. This kind of reunion — on HGTV — is a gift, because this is not about us as characters. This is about us, but showing some love to one of the characters of the show, which happens to be the house.

When ‘The Brady Bunch’ ended its run, was there a strong enough bond created between the six of you that you could imagine remaining friends for life?

Those are all backward thinking awarenesses and concepts. With the Bradys thing itself, the success wasn’t in the moment. It’s grown in time and because it did, when looking back on it, it appears to have been this great big success. It’s been a great big success, because it’s proved to never die. Not because it was a great big success in any one moment in time; it’s just always there and in that way it’s like, I don’t know, something like an old slipper or something. Looking back on it, I don’t think there was any kind of shock. There was a routine, but that was good. I wanted to go to high school when the show was in production, but then in 10^th grade my parents, along with all the other parents, sent their children to a private professional school, which was just absolutely crazy. I didn’t feel I was getting any education at all. But the reason for that is because there was this Brady act [The Brady Kids] that had come to life and that when the show wasn’t working, we were going to work on that. We needed to have school that was more capable of understanding the schedules of show kids and public school doesn’t necessarily work the same way. This was a school built for kids in the industry who are going to be checking in, checking out and for 10th grade I had to do that and I hated it.

Then 11th grade comes around and I’m working on the last season, which wrapped in the spring time. That let me enter high school halfway through 11^th grade, which I wanted to do because I knew I didn’t want to be an actor at that point. I was just caught up in it. I wanted to be a scientist and I needed to take labs, I wanted to boil water. I just wanted to be normal; one of the kids in my neighborhood. I got swept up in this acting thing and it took over and really wasn’t fully baked at that point. I would have never have picked acting for myself if it wasn’t for my dad being in the industry and getting me an agent. I didn’t have a performer bone in me like Barry [Williams] does. For me, acting isn’t performing. It’s more intimate than somebody performing onstage and performing music and stuff.

Like The Brady Kids concert tour?

And I hated that, because I had no talent, no interest in that area. I got swept up in that. When the show went off the air, it gave me the opportunity to leave this thing that was attached to me behind. The group wanted to continue, but I didn’t want to continue with it at all. To me it was substandard. Here I am, the Bob Reed of a little group, but it wasn’t any interest to me. It didn’t serve me. If anything, I loved the work of acting, but not being on stage and trying to sing when I couldn’t. None of that attention felt valid to me, because it was, like, “Well, I’m supposed to be professional. I can’t do this at that level. Who are we kidding here?” It didn’t nourish me. So I said “No, I’m quitting the group and I’m going back to high school.” That happened because the show also ended. It wasn’t like I had to continue being a Brady.

At the time, we didn’t have any time off and we were never apart from one another. One of the things that I was maybe not conscious of, but I would look back on and recognize, is that at least with other jobs in the business of acting you become very facile at making friends very quickly that you’ll never see again. The Bradys are friends that I’ll keep for life, because there was such closeness during an important part of our lives that even though we no longer have an excuse to be around each other for really any length of time, there is nobody in my life that I’ve known for 51 years other than my own brother and sister and that’s it. Other friends of mine go back to high school maybe, but nobody goes back to when I was 10. The reason that these aren’t like other actors is there was much more time spent with them, and the crucible of being a Brady who is continually reminded that you’re a Brady. Even though you’re not in the show anymore, the experience of this life being a Brady is something I have in common with just, now, five other people. That continues to bond us if for nothing else.

You said you were looking for some normalcy, but you moved into the business sector in the early days of PCs and did well for yourself. It was an interesting direction for your life to take.

I had too much awareness of the business of acting from my father. Literally, very consciously, I didn’t trust it. I thought, okay, so look at how it occurred for me. Came out of nowhere. It blossoms and just as easily as it came, it could go. It wasn’t like I wasn’t capable of fooling myself, because there wasn’t a whole lot of energy placed on a need for being successful as an actor. It just happened to me, but easy come, easy go it is certainly in play. I guess I was protected by that, because the reality is even if you are an actor and by your own efforts and your own determination, you become successful, you could still find yourself not working regardless. I had a real good view of how much this business is just really based upon luck and I wanted to get out of that. I equate it to walking a ladder just through attrition. You don’t even really have to move up the rungs of the ladder; the ladder itself is bringing you up. In the entertainment industry it’s not really a ladder, it’s a barrel. The more successful you are, the quicker you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the barrel being recycled. You’ve got to withstand that and it’s going to happen repetitively — if you’re lucky it’ll happen repetitively. None of that is something you’re in control of. I saw my dad struggle. I was working because my dad didn’t work or didn’t make enough money for a family. My dad was telling my mom, when we were just like two and three years old, they didn’t have enough income so she should feed us every other day.

Oh my God.

They really had no right to have children. He’s an actor struggling, making ends meet by having all these other jobs and none of them fulfilling, because what he wants to be is an actor. My dad was a very educated person, and his friends look back on it and say, “Actors are some of the highest IQ-ed homeless people there are.” They are artists. They’ve picked an avenue with very little economic opportunity that they can control, and by being in the arts they’re relatively educated mostly, in some cases maybe just savant, but bright people who’ve chosen a path that’s going to cause them to live nearly on the street. That was my dad and I didn’t want that. I thought there’s got to be something else I could do. I thought I was leaving the industry completely when I went off to UCLA. Eventually I found my way to the computer industry. I had an opportunity, took it up, and took to it like a duck to water.

Admittedly I didn’t have any of the background any of these other people do, but in the early PC industry, no one had a background in it; everybody’s learning on the job, but it all interested me. I took to it and then ran that for 20 years and got tired of that or needed to take some space from that and then came back to the industry. I wasn’t intending to completely leave the entertainment industry, but it’s what happened, because all of a sudden I had employees and managing responsibilities and the idea of being available to go on to interviews wasn’t something I could do to people who were entrusting me with responsibility. I had to make a choice. It was good to me and it grew. I learned a lot and now I’m able to do both, which I don’t do through necessarily high tech anymore. But I do it through Christopher Knight Home and other business ventures. Christopher Knight Home is a brand that was started in 2012. It’s furniture and we sell all the product online. We do a lot of business in the furniture industry under the brand and now I’m actually a branching out into a more lines, more types of items that are not just home decor, but lifestyle stuff. It’s come a long way.

There have been, as you’re probably aware, a number of ‘Brady Bunch’ spinoffs. For starters, what are your thoughts on ‘The Brady Kids’ cartoon?

I still don’t understand that logic, but then cartoons like that are created by some very creative people. We had nothing to do with the genesis of it other than I guess they were modeling us after Scooby-Doo and that sort of thing, so they needed some other players like Merlin the bird and the pandas. It’s just really odd, but later understanding where Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles  came from, there are probably individuals in the creation of the show that know a little bit more about the audience and things they need to throw into it to somehow give it more attachment points. We could have been on the air longer with that, but we had a hard time with the deal ultimately, so it all fell apart. But what I was aware of at the time we were doing The Brady Kids is that once you become a success, they want you to do all kinds of things. That’s where the music came in, and I said, “I can’t sing.” Ultimately my mom said, “Listen, they said that you could just spit on an album and people will buy it,” and that really offended me. That’s probably why I didn’t ever really try to get better buying in on that. It’s like, “Really? You’ve got to have respect for your audience,” and that obviously is not where I want to ply my trade.

But from there ‘The Brady Bunch Variety Hour’ must have been a pure nightmare.

That was my coming back into the industry after going to UCLA, discovering the little things I did about myself that I wouldn’t understand for another 10 years. Things like, “Why is this going to be so difficult for me in these surroundings?” I didn’t know how to reach out for any help, didn’t know what was going on. I’m not a stupid person, but I didn’t necessarily have or had developed any study patterns that could have overcome the issues I was confronting. I was looking for access back into entertainment and the variety show was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, though they were offering a great deal of money, which is also part of this, but it was music. Music was just hounding me; it kept coming back into my life.

We negotiated that I wouldn’t have to do much music, but I’d be relied upon for the sketch opening and closing only for music. Well, that was a bunch of nonsens. I couldn’t do a solo, but they had me do a thing with Rip Taylor at one point and with Florence that was excruciating, though it actually played out quite nicely. Again, it’s not difficult for people who understand music and to whom music speaks, but music speaks to me at a very rudimentary level. It doesn’t resonate inside of me. It’s like that song, “You’ve Got the Music in You.” Well, if there’s a continuum for all things and if someone has the music in them, it stands to reason there’s someone else on that spectrum that doesn’t. I’m that guy.

At the same time — and this was insane — Robert Reed really seemed to be enjoying it.

He really, really took to it, which was quite humorous and telling as well. It was just another Brady experience, so yes, it was crazy. The color on it is extraordinary and another odd psychedelic expression. So, yes, I did do it and luckily it wasn’t around that long. It did get me back into the industry and it would be around a few years later that I would do something that I really did have a great deal of pride in, but it didn’t end up lasting. It was a Tandem show, Norman Lear’s company. Alan Horn was the producer and it was called Joe’s World and it was about a blue-collar family out at Detroit, a working class family. I played the oldest son and it was like a new spin on All in the Family. You know, following in your father’s footsteps or not, not wanting to live your dad’s life, all that stuff. All good stuff. Brandon Tartikoff was running the network at that time and it was ultimately on NBC. Eventually the choice came down between two shows and the other show got the nod. We didn’t and that show was The Facts of Life. But Joe’s World itself and what we did on that was something I took great pride in, but I learned that getting a series is not even one tenth the issue. Staying on the air is.

Next up was the TV movie ‘The Brady Girls Get Married’ and the series ‘The Brady Brides.’

I don’t really have much of an opinion on it. I wasn’t really involved with it a whole lot. It was a more adult version of Bradys and I didn’t form an opinion, because I wasn’t really part of it. I wasn’t quite at that point ready to embrace Brady heavily. I was actually doing [the soap opera] Another World at the time, so I had to take a week off and get to LA to do my small role in that. I thought, “Okay, this Brady thing doesn’t seem to be dying,” which would lead to the idea that it would never die. Eventually, while I was in Australia, I discovered that there’s some real warmth and strength in having been a Brady and perhaps it shouldn’t be run away from. I think it was because of these subsequent reiterations that just kept me aware that it was coming back every seven years or so. That there’s somebody asking us to do it again, so it’s probably going to keep happening.

‘A Very Brady Christmas’ TV movie and the series ‘The Bradys’ was a much more serious take on the material, which some people dubbed ‘Bradysomething.’

I was an actor at that time and it was actually fun to recreate a life for Peter. That was somewhat more adult and in that environment it’s not necessarily what the audience wants from us, because they remember The Brady Bunch. Now we’re adults and with perhaps not enough horsepower in the scripts necessarily to make that work, and why would anybody really want this to be a heavy drama? There was an application of drama, but it was an overreach perhaps in trying to make it deep. But it was fun to do. I learned from that that I always have a good time with this group of people. And that ultimately is more important.

Which leads us to the HGTV show. Is that something you’re enjoying?

I think it’s a kick in the pants and quite a stroke of luck to be honored in this fashion, because that’s ultimately what they’re doing. They’re giving us a celebration send off, if you will, by reconciling this house to be inside what people think that it is. I know what it’s going to be in the end, but this whole experience is going to take like five or seven days of work over seven months. It doesn’t have a continuity that has yet created a true experience, if you will. It’s going to require not just the few days that I’ve worked at the front end, but it’s going to require those few days that I work through the middle and then the end to allow me to tie it up into one experience. So far, it’s a little disjointed, but they’re perfectly lovely people to work for. And again, like I said, it’s a hoot and that this has come our way and that they actually did make deals with everybody is wonderful. It’s the first time in 35 years that we’ve all been working together. That’s significant and gratifying, and just presents this more as a legacy as this house makes it all about the 50th anniversary of The Brady Bunch.

When they bought the house, I’m not certain whether or not they knew that. I told them that in a meeting we had right after the network bought it. Then they met with us just to talk, because they had some concept of perhaps working together, but they didn’t know how. They didn’t really know what the show was going to be about yet. They didn’t have a show concept when they bought it. It just came up in the news it was for sale and they bought it and then they had to figure out what they were going to do with it. And I think that it was a discovery on their part that the show was going to be an event with September of 2019 being the 50th anniversary.

Earlier, you referred to this as the last cycle. If that’s how you feel, is there something sad about that?

Our relationships and so forth exist without it having to be entertainment, so it’s not an end of our friendship. It’s not the end of our interpersonal realities. I could be very wrong about there not being some opportunity to work together again, but look, it’s been 35 years since all of us have worked on the same project. I doubt there’s going to be another opportunity for everyone to work together again or reason to or excuse to. But it’s a kick in the pants that we’re having that opportunity, because I really thought that boat had already sailed, while the Bradys, in my mind, live regardless of us doing new stuff. That is the reality. This Brady world lives in people’s minds. Peter exists independent of Chris in an interesting way and, ultimately, he has an opportunity to last forever. Chris doesn’t.

You can listen to our two-part podcast interview with Chris over at our CloserWeekly.com Classic TV Podcast page.