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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 align their schedules in such a way that I could watch multiple episodes of the show, back to back.
Even by sitcom standards the show was completely hokey, but it was that mawkish sentimentality that was so appealing. In the Brady’s world, any problem — a nose break, a heartache, a lost dog — could be solved within 30 minutes. There was no issue that couldn’t be tackled with just a few sage words from Dad, a hug from Mom, or a good family singalong. (Except for maybe a bully — that one required physical violence. But even the bully eventually came to see the error of his ways in the end.)
I was fascinated by the Bradys, who existed on an entirely different plane than my own. As an only child raised by a single mother, I had no concept of what life could be like with happily married parents, five siblings, and a live-in maid. The Bradys ate home-cooked meals together as a family; I ate my dinners solo in front the TV while my mom paid…
