The Brady Bunch

infobox television
show_name = The Brady Bunch


caption = The "Brady Bunch" opening "grid", season one
format = Sitcom
producer = A Sherwood Schwartz Production
In Association With Paramount Television
runtime = approx. 23:00 (per episode)
location = Hollywood, California
North Hollywood, California
creator = Sherwood Schwartz
starring = Robert Reed
Florence Henderson
Barry Williams
Maureen McCormick
Christopher Knight
Eve Plumb
Mike Lookinland
Susan Olsen
Ann B. Davis
opentheme = The Brady Bunch Theme
country = USA
network = ABC
first_aired = September 26, 1969
last_aired = March 8, 1974
num_seasons = 5
num_episodes = 117
imdb_id = 0063878

"The Brady Bunch" is an American television situation comedy based around a large blended family. The show originally aired from September 26, 1969 to March 8, 1974 on the ABC network and was subsequently syndicated around the world.

Overview

Origins

In 1965, following the success of his TV series "Gilligan's Island", Sherwood Schwartz conceived the idea for "The Brady Bunch" after reading an article in the "Los Angeles Times" that said "40% of marriages [in the United States] had a child or children from [a] previous marriage." He instantly set to work on a pilot script, called "Yours and Mine", and passed it around the "big three" television networks of the era. ABC, CBS and NBC all loved the script, but each network wanted changes to it before they would commit to filming it. Schwartz felt that his script was perfect, and although he had the interest of all three networks in America, he decided to shelve it. [Biography Channel Documentary titled "The Brady Bunch", retrieved on June 16, 2008.]

Despite the similarities between the series and the 1968 theatrical release "Yours, Mine and Ours" starring Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, the original script for "The Brady Bunch" pre-dated the script for the film. However, the success of the film was likely a factor in ABC's eventually ordering the series.

Plot

Mike Brady (Robert Reed), a widowed architect with sons Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight) and Bobby (Mike Lookinland), married Carol Martin (née Tyler) (Florence Henderson), whose daughters were Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb) and Cindy (Susan Olsen). The daughters took the Brady surname. Schwartz wanted Carol to have been a divorcée. The network objected to this, but a compromise was reached whereby no mention was made of the circumstances in which Carol's first marriage ended, but many assume she was widowed. The newly-formed juvenile sextet, parents Carol and Mike, Mike's live-in housekeeper Alice (Ann B. Davis), and the boys' dog Tiger settled into a large, suburban home designed by Mike.

Often erroneously cited as the first series to show a "blended" family (two series which debuted in the 1950s, "Make Room For Daddy" and "Bonanza", had step-siblings and half-siblings respectively), it came at a time when divorce and remarriage in America was seeing a surge. Episodes in the first season chronicled the family learning to adjust to its new circumstances and become a unit, as well as typical childhood problems such as dating, rivalries and family squabbles and the fact that their house had two bedrooms for six children.

Subtle references to larger social problems found their way into the dialogue from time to time. In one social-issue episode, season two's "The Liberation of Marcia Brady," Marcia explores the oppression of the Brady women and sets out to prove a girl can do anything a boy can. The boys find this very upsetting and Peter finds himself joining the Sunflower Girls, Marcia's club, in hopes of making her back down from her 'bad idea'.

Mike did much of his architectural work in an office/design studio within the house, an apparent way of lending some realism to the way in which sitcom dads seem to be almost always at home while nonetheless earning a good living. In the episodes where he was shown in his away-from-home office, he often came home from work about the same time the children got home from school.

The theme song penned by Schwartz quickly communicated to audiences that the Bradys were a blended family, though the situation largely was deemphasized from the second season on with a few exceptions. Two episodes from the third season, "Not So Rose Colored Glasses" and "Jan's Aunt Jenny", mention that Mike and Carol had been married for three years. In "Kelly's Kids," reference was made to the Bradys' adoptions ("Either way, you adopted three boys and you adopted three girls, right?") when their neighbors, the Kellys, adopted three boys of different races.

Original run and subsequent success

In 1971, due to the success of the Brady's ABC Friday night companion show "The Partridge Family" (about a musical family), some episodes began to feature the Brady Kids as a singing group. Though only a handful of shows actually featured them singing and performing ("Dough-Re-Mi" in the third season, "Amateur Nite" in the fourth and "Adios, Johnny Bravo" in the fifth), the Brady Bunch began to release albums. Though they never charted as high as the Partridges, the cast began touring the United States during the summer hiatus from the show, headlining as "The Kids from the Brady Bunch". Although only Barry Williams and Maureen McCormick stayed in the music business as adults, Christopher Knight readily admits he felt he could not sing and recalls having great anxiety about performing live on stage with the cast.

"The Brady Bunch" never achieved high ratings during its primetime run (never placing in the top 25 during the five years it aired) and was canceled in 1974 when Greg graduated from high school and was about to enroll in college. Despite its less-than-stellar primetime ratings and having won no awards, the show would become a true cultural phenomenon, enduring in the minds of Americans and in syndication for decades. The series has spawned several sequel series on the "big 3" U.S. networks, two made-for-theater and three made-for-TV movies, a touring stage show and countless specials and documentaries on both network and cable TV.

Since its first airing in syndication in September 1975, an episode of the show has been broadcast somewhere in the United States and abroad every single day of every single year through at least 2007. Reruns were also shown on ABC in the daytime from July 9, 1973 to August 29, 1975, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern/10:30 Central. The run was interrupted only once, between April 21 and June 27, 1975, when ABC ran a short-lived game show, "Blankety Blanks," in that time slot.

When the episodes were repeated in syndication, they usually appeared every weekday in late-afternoon or early-evening slots on local stations. This enabled children to watch the episodes when they came home from school, making the program widely popular and giving it iconic status among those who were too young to have seen the series during its prime time run. The show's longevity in the public mind largely owes to that phenomenon, which was a unique aberration from the traditional norm of a previously-run network program being sold to stations as schedule filler between network programming blocs.

According to Schwartz, the reason the show has become a part of Americana despite the fact that there have been other shows that ran longer, rated higher and were critically acclaimed is that the episodes were written from the standpoint of the children and addressed situations that children could understand (such as girl trouble, sibling rivalry and meeting famous people such as a rock star or baseball player). The Bradys also comprised a harmonious family (compared to the likes of the Bunkers, the Bundys, the Simpsons, etc...), though they did run into problems occasionally when one of the children did not cooperate with his or her parents or the other children. In fact, anticipating the likelihood that some children might "act out" some plotlines, the producers had a form letter they sent to children who wrote stating their desires to run away from their own families and live with the Bradys. It has also been noted that the Bradys, while not wealthy, lived well by the middle-class standards of the early 1970s, having a live-in housekeeper and taking frequent trips.

Cast

The regular cast appeared in an opening title sequence in which video head shots were arranged in a three-by-three grid, with each cast member appearing to look at the other cast members. The sequence has been widely imitated and lampooned since.

See also

*
* Tam Spiva, a "Brady Bunch" script writer

Notes

External links

*
* [http://www.bradyresidence.com Brady Residence]
* [http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/bradybunch/bradybunch.htm Encyclopedia of Television]
* [http://www.popcultureaddict.com/television/bradybunch.htm Here's The Story of the Spawn of Brady: The Show That Just Wouldn't Die] In Depth Article About Brady Bunch Spin Offs at Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict
* [http://www.bradyworld.com bradyworld.com] - online resource for "The Brady Bunch"
* [http://daily.mahalo.com/2008/02/20/md061-the-greg-brady-project/ Interview with Barry Williams on "The Greg Brady Project"]
* [http://www.nyx.net/~thill/brady.html The Canonical Brady Bunch Episode Guide]
* [http://davidbrady.com/times/latbrady.html Chateau Brady] ("Los Angeles Times", Sept. 26, 1994)
* [http://www.tvland.com/shows/brady_bunch/ "The Brady Bunch" on TVLand.com]
* [http://gridskipper.com/357946/the-brady-bunch-guide-to-honolulu The Brady Bunch Guide to Honolulu]