A recent Gilligan’s Island thread sent me searching for an article (forget the author’s name) about the dark secret behind the events of the show. Got me to thinking, on what other shows might there be dark conspiracies lurking just belong the surface?
The Brady Bunch
The Brady boys and the eventual Brady girls first met through their mutual criminal connections. Sensing a potentially valuable partnership in the making, each group of children offed the less easily manipulated of their parents, then successfully conspired behind the scenes to bring the survivors together.
The new Brady Family quickly rose to the head of their own Brady “Family”. The mastermind of all this juvenile criminality was young Cindy, a bad seed whose precious pigtails and too-cute lisp masked a bloodthirsty megalomaniacal mob leader.
The children tried way to hard to act like “normal children” and it shows. Their cluless parents may have been fooled, but most other people found their blatantly insincere syrupy-sweetness offputting. Greg and Marcia were especially unconvinving in their efforts to date other teenagers in a futile effort to mask their own torrid love affair.
The spoiled Marcia was actually a very scary person who could be quite vicious when she didn’t get what she wanted. Take the time she made Davey Jones an “offer he couldn’t refuse” to get him to play at her High School. Being a relatively busy man in those days he couldn’t just run off across the country to please every teenage girl who wanted him to put on a free concert. He changed his tune after finding the head of Mike Nesmith in his bed.
Contrary to the fakeness of the rest of their act, Jan’s burning hatred of her pretty, popular sister Marcia (born in part of her own feelings for Greg) were even more genuine than they seemed to the outside observer. She was forever arranging “accidents” for Marcia, but her own ineptitude ensured they never panned out. Her greatest victory was a scheme involving an exploding football. The pyrotechnic pigskin failed to blow, but at least it caused Marcia’s nose to swell to twice its size. That was pretty good.
The Brady Mob enforcers? Former Mob Moll turned domestic/criminal Gal Friday “Black” Alice and her boyfriend, nototious hitman Sam “The Butcher” whose cover just happened to be working in a real butcher shop. (You don’t wanna know what he puts in the suasages. Ever wonder what happened to Tiger?)
Eventually the family welcomed a new addition. What they didn’t know was that the mysterious “Cousin Olvier” was actually a dwarf working for the Feds. His cover was evenutally blown and the series came to an end just before he was bumped off and the kids manufactured a complicated but convincing lie to get their parents to join them on the lam.
The family eventually returned, bizarrely, in a strange variety show whose full purpose was never uncovered, though some claim money laundering was involved. Poor Jan, gunned down by the Feds after a botched bank job, was replaced by an unconvincing stand-in.