The premise of “The Brady Bunch” was that after their spouses died, Mike and Carol got together and formed one big family. We’re reminded of this by the theme song every episode. It seems to me however that this fact was de-emphasized more and more as the series progressed… Marsha never refers to Greg as his “step-brother”. The parents are “mom” and “dad” to all the kids. The whole premise of the show seemed to be a dirty little secret that was swept under the rug. This doesn’t seem to be a bad thing, I don’t think the show loses anything after they just become a “regular” family. Did Sherwood Schwartz just figure he needed a gimmick to get the series off the ground, and then it was no longer needed after the first few episodes?
My WAG is that Sherwood Schlutz didn’t give anything about the show even this much thought.
I kinda thought the same thing, that the premise was basically abandoned.
Although I’m not a huge fan of Schwartz’s work, after reading his autobio a few years ago, I give him credit for perhaps giving his shows too much thought. The man pitched “Gilligan’s Island” as a “microcosm of humanity” before realizing he was losing the executives’ attention with too many big words.
Sir Rhosis
Looks like somebody’s been watching TV Land this weekend!
Yeah, they abandoned the concept pretty quickly. You may remember the episode where Greg gets caught smoking - he’s in a band and Carol claims that he got his musical talent from her side of the family.
My guess is that somewhere along the line somebody figured out that they had three pairs of same age/different sex, unrelated kids sharing a bathroom–so, to divert attention from all the opportunities for playing unsupervised doctor present in every episode they decided to downplay the original premise.
I remember occasional references to the stepfather/stepmother issue, though they may have occurred in earlier, rather than later, episodes:
- one where Marcia (I think) wins some sort of “Father of the Year” essay contest that included comments along the lines of “though he (Mike) is not my real father, he’s still the best Dad in the world blah blah…”
- another one where Bobby gets upset about something mother-related and a photo of the first Mrs Brady is produced. Mike then tells Bobby that it’s no disrespect to his “real” mother for Bobby to look on Carol as his mother now. Or something like that.
The second example was in the pilot episode. However, there was another episode where Bobby watched Cinderella on TV and becomes convinced Carol hates him because he’s a “step.” It ended tidely with Mike pointing to that big staircase and proclaiming that those were the only “steps” in the family. That was probably the deepest the issue was ever explored.
Ah, I see you are ignorant of “The Brady Bunch: the un-aired episodes”. In those many deep issues are explored.
Carol Brady: precocious hairstyle or cancer victim?
Mike Brady delves into his “Roots”, as evidenced by his hair.
Alice opens a restaurant.
Sam the butcher: mildly autistic or latently gay?
Cindy: poster child for developementally disabled blondes.
And many, many more.
If only these would be released by the production company, a certain itch would be scratched for so many of the devoted fans of this very special, American family.
IANABBE (I am not a Brady Bunch Expert), but I was raised in a blended family. We never use “step-” unless we are mad at someone. My stepmom is “mom” and my stepbrothers “my brothers” unless it’s vitally important that the distinction be made. And I still have a living biological mother that I lived with much of the time. Somehow, our heads didn’t implode. We knew who I meant when I talked about “mom” based on context.
It was certainly pitched that way to Robert Reed: He joined the cast after being promised it would deal with the issues involved in blending a family. He quickly realized it was going to be nothing like that, and resented it for the rest of his life.
I always wanted Bobby to scream “YOU’RE NOT MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER IS DEAD!” and run off.
A conspiracy indeed. “Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently certain things have become unpleasant. Now, it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant.”
The only way I can tolerate The Brady Bunch is, as with The Wizard of Oz, *, Gilligan’s Island, and Bill Flanigan’s Spy Magazine article on My Three Sons (“My Disappearing Sons”) in which he sketches out the murderous regin of Fred MacMurray, is to speculate on the underlying darkness and depravity behind these shows. Every happy family has a mad great-aunt (or a few) locked in the attic, and the more perfect they appear, the more they have to hide.
That’s my theory, anyway. And remind me to tell you about June Cleaver and the vaccuming she was aways doing…
Stranger
Speaking as someone with five siblings, I think they HAD to go with the premise if they wanted to tell a story about a “typical” family: typical families don’t have six kids, and when you have six biological children, there is a suspicion that either you are dangerously religious or dangerously sexual or dangerously incompetent. It’s either trashy or self-indulgent. People accidently ending up with six kids, on the other hand, can be a typical family. It’s an explainatoin that people were more ocmfortable with, but once it served it’s purpose it could be forgotton.
So which were your parents? angelic smiley
Nitpick: Only Mike’s first spouse was supposed to have died. Carol was supposed to have been divorced (although I think they may have only mentioned that in the pilot). I always wondered why the girls’ natural father never so much as sent them a postcard or why the girls never once ever mentioned him.
I thought that her fist husband was lost at sea, and implied to be the Professor on Gilligan’s Island.
I got the impression that The Professor was on the run for bedding a number of his (presumably female) students. I’ll note that it was generally The Professor who concocted their weekly scheme for escape from The Island, and it was he who was responsible for consistantly putting Gilligan in a (not always obvious) lynchpin position to cause their attempt to fail. This distracted attention from The Professor’s desire to remain on The Island, out of the reach of the univeristy board, the local police, and the FBI. Either that, or The Professor was involved in the fake Mars mission (as detailed in Capricorn One) and went into hiding when he realized that the lack of time-lag in communications would indicate to any junior-high physical science student that the scheme was a fake.
Stranger
As I recall, the fate of Carol’s first husband was never mentioned on the show at all. The back-story was supposed to be that they were divorced – and all of the writers and producers knew this – but it was considered to be too edgy and so it was never explicitly stated on the actual show. Mike’s first wife was dead and this was mentioned in the pilot.
At first there were episodes that addressed the issue of blending the family. The episodes that have been mentioned (the father-of-the-year one, the evil-stepmother one, the bit in the pilot where Mike speaks to Bobby about keeping his real mother’s photo) were some, but there were others, too. In fact, flipping through an episode guide, I see lots of ‘adjustment’ episodes in the first season. The very first post-pilot episode was an adjustment episode, with Marcia worried that a person who wrote in to a newspaper advice columnist about his or her rotten step kids may have been her mom or Mike. There was one where the boys feel crowded by all the new girls in the house and build a no-girls clubhouse in the backyard. In another, Jan (of course!) is believed to be allergic to the boy’s dog. In one, Alice has adjustment issues – she had been the boy’s housekeepr and mother-figure since their mother died and felt unneccesary after Carol moved in. There is an episode with a disagreement about whether the new family should use the girl’s pediatrician or the boy’s; and another where they disagreed about how to use the trading stamps the two families had collected prior to the marriage…
Of the first 20 episodes (not counting the pilot), 12 or them featured adjustment issues. After that, not so much. In fact, practically none. There are a few episodes with the boys arguing with the girls, but these are explained as splits along gender lines, rather than original-family lines. There’s an episode where Carol writes a book about her chaotic family life, but the focus seems to be an the size of the family, rather than its blended nature. The only explicit blended-family reference I could find after the 20th episode was the one where the kids go to buy their folks a silver platter for their anniversary and the clerk at the store asks how long their parents had been married and was surprised to hear that they’d only been married a couple of years and already have 6 kids!
Jess (who has too much time on her hands this weekend)
Manda JO writes:
> Speaking as someone with five siblings, I think they HAD to go with the premise
> if they wanted to tell a story about a “typical” family: typical families don’t have
> six kids, and when you have six biological children, there is a suspicion that
> either you are dangerously religious or dangerously sexual or dangerously
> incompetent.
Speaking as somone with seven siblings, my family didn’t fit into any of those categories.