Enduring Appeal `The Brady Bunch’ Keeps Filling America’s Desire For The Ideal Blended Family

On March 8, 1974, a sitcom that had rated no higher than 20th place during its five-year run aired its final original episode. Few Americans over the age of 16 noticed or cared. After all, this was a program the critics savaged and the mainstream press largely ignored. Newspaper TV columns carried neither eulogies nor appeals to save it from cancellation. There was no tearstained final episode.

And why not? That show, “The Brady Bunch” - about a widow with three girls who marries a widower with three boys - would presumably be consigned to reruns or more likely to TV heaven. Life would go on. The show’s audience would grow up.

If anyone had the vision to predict the show’s fate in the next 20 years, come forth now and give us a hint on the price of IBM.

For rather than disappearing, “The Brady Bunch” became a touchstone for a generation, a show that has elbowed its way into the pantheon of cult TV shows along with “Star Trek,” “The Honeymooners” and “The Twilight Zone.”

The original program spawned a 1973 Saturday-morning cartoon show, a 1977-78 variety hour, a 1981 spinoff (“The Brady Brides,” which was spun off from the TV movie, “The Brady Girls Get Married”), a 1988 TV movie (“A Very Brady Christmas”) and a 1990 drama series. In 1991 and 1992, a stage production, “The Real Live Brady Bunch,” re-created episodes wordfor-word, packing houses in Chicago and New York.

And now, the big screen beckons. “The Brady Bunch Movie” was the Presidents’ Day weekend film favorite, earning $15 million in its first four days, according to estimates Monday by studio and industry sources. Final weekend box office figures will be released today.

The movie’s nominal plot may be the notion that the Bradys are still stuck in the ‘70s, although it’s 1995, but the movie is essentially an 85-minute in-joke whose subplots are cobbled together from episodes of the original show.

TV actors Shelley Long (“Cheers”) and Gary Cole (“Midnight Caller”) segue effortlessly into the clothes, hairstyles and personalities of parents Mike and Carol Brady. The six kids and Alice the maid also bear uncanny resemblances to the originals. Brady aficionados, who have transformed the sitcom into a pop-culture phenomenon, will snicker knowingly throughout the film.

“Brady Bunch” creator Sherwood Schwartz, a former Bob Hope gagwriter who also created “Gilligan’s Island,” has said his show’s appeal is due to “The stories … human family stories. I don’t care what the generation is, it’s the same: the problems of communicating, of honesty, of being the middle child, of little things like wearing braces or wearing glasses.”

That, indeed, is true. But one could say the same thing for “The Brady Bunch’s” 1950s ancestors, “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver,” or its modern-day descendants, “The Cosby Show” or even “Roseanne.”

There’s got to be more here, of course. Here are four more reasons for the show’s enduring appeal:

Good timing and the economics of the TV business: The darn show has never left the air. Each of the 117 episodes has been shown over and over daily for the past two decades. The explosion of cable oulets created a hunger for programming, and the show’s wholesomeness made perfect afterschool fare (in an era where racier, more topical sitcoms were being offered for syndication). Moreover, “The Brady Bunch” was in color, which was more desirable than the black-and-white wholesome sitcoms of the ‘50s. The constant reruns increased the show’s fan base exponentially: They were watched not only by the show’s original viewers, but by their younger siblings, their younger siblings and by the children of the original viewers.

But what made this mass of viewers different from those generations that watched, say, “I Love Lucy,” was that many of these kids were the products of broken homes. Divorces skyrocketed in the ‘70s and ‘80s, causing immense pain and dislocation. Yet, every afternoon, kids could watch this program where a blended family had worked things out, where (a non-working) mom and a maid would be there with milk and cookies, and all sibling squabbles would be manfully arbitrated by dad.

Moreover, “The Brady Bunch’s” concept was quite ingenious: Having three boys and three girls of varying ages provided a kind of instant appeal to members of both sexes of those same ages (ranging from about 7 to 12 when the show premiered), who could identify (or be annoyed) with any of the Brady kids.

The lure of nostalgia: With their overromanticizing of the ‘50s and ‘60s, baby boomers sometimes make it seem as if their Wonder Years were the only ones that mattered. As the post-boomers entered their 20s and 30s, they began to mythologize their own pasts - a key part of which was spent watching “The Brady Bunch.” And after dealing with the secondhand nostalgia (classic rock, early-‘60s sitcoms) handed down by the boomers, “The Brady Bunch” was something they could call their own.

The kitsch values: The 1970s was, as everyone agrees, among the most taste-free decades in world history. And in every episode of “The Brady Bunch,” the most garish excesses of that decade are in your face: from the Bradys’ avocado- and tangerine-colored kitchen to their “groovy” hairstyles to the crocheted vests, Huckapoo shirts and plaid bell-bottoms.

From an adult perspective, some of the show’s more goofy contrivances stand out in even bolder relief: not just how dorky the kids were, but how did nine people share one bathroom (and one where we never saw or heard a toilet)? What about the sexual subtext between Greg and Marcia? How the hell did the family live that lifestyle on one income?

Real life? No way: “The Brady Bunch’s” original run nearly paralleled the same years as the Nixon administration, a time of great social ferment and generational upheaval that TV programming had just begun to reflect. But except for a few episodes (the tame subject of ecology or a gentle poke at women’s liberation), the Bradys reveled in their irrelevance. While Archie Bunker might be railing against Sen. Sam “Irving” or praising President Richard “E.” Nixon, the Bradys, undoubtedly card-carrying members of the Silent Majority, were more concerned about what to do with 94 books of trading stamps.

It’s easy to laugh at “The Brady Bunch.” But dig deeper, past the shag haircuts and dopey expressions, and you hit upon a more deeply felt emotion: a yearning for the kind of idealized family life the Bradys had. Most of us didn’t have a live-in housekeeper or open and sympathetic parents or get along as famously with our siblings.

As many of the original Brady watchers become parents themselves, struggling to maintain a Brady-like lifestyle with fewer kids and two incomes, the yearning becomes even stronger.

MEMO: See also sidebar which appeared with this story under headline “How much do you really know about the Brady Bunch?”