50 Years Later, ‘The Brady Bunch’ is Still A Welcome Diversion from Real Life
There’s a moment in the first season of The Brady Bunch where Alice, the Brady’s housekeeper, says, “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a perfect kid. And six of them…yuck!” It’s a statement dripping with irony. Those six perfect kids, along with their perfect parents, perfect house, and yes, perfect housekeeper, are precisely what made The Brady Bunch a pop culture phenomenon.
If you’ve never seen the show — a feat in and of itself, given its long life in reruns — the premise is simple: A single (presumably widowed) mother of three girls, Carol, marries a single (widowed) man, Mike, who has three boys of his own. Though the saccharine sitcom, which premiered on September 26, 1969, never broke the Top 30 during its five-season prime time run, it became a nearly instant success once in syndication. It was in the late 1970s and into the 1980s that Gen X kids like me became hooked on that Brady goodness, and an entertainment staple was born.
When I was in elementary school, my goal was to finish my homework early enough to squeeze in an hour or two of The Brady Bunch every day. If I was lucky, the syndication gods would…
