I was nine when "The Brady Bunch" premiered on ABC-TV in the fall of 1969, which was followed a year lady by "The Partridge Family" and was part of my TGIF lineup along with "Room 222," "The Old Couple," and "Love. American Style." All my friends were devoted to these programs for 3-4 years. Ask me the primetime line-up of any evening before or since on any network and I could not think of any, but that Friday night was sacred. We of the tail end of the Baby Boom don't forget happy memories that easily!
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Perhaps the reunion of the six original children in the Brady Bunch will remind us that the typical blended family of the 1960s is not what many blended families look like in America today. For example, the couple might be two lesbian women of different ethnicities and the children would also reflect the ethnicities of their biological parents. Today's multicultural family has long existed in certain cultures, such as the U.S. military, and is to be celebrated for the fact that love and family-life is not confined to any singular stereotyped 'traditional' family.
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Don't forget Alice's boyfriend.
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How sad is this?
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While we're waiting for the HGTV Brady Renovation, check this out. I made a computer generated tour of the home just as it was on TV but including the ceilings and all 4 walls, so it feels like a real home. https://youtu.be/PJ6x-VkGeEc
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You can't live in the past, and both these shows are like the "cool" kids who peaked in high school and keep attending every reunion hoping to recapture what no longer is. The world has moved on and grown up, but they cling to what should just be left alone.
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I think it's a great idea! I loved the show way back when.
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I was in high school when "The Brady Bunch" aired originally and tried to avoid being home on Friday nights. But I caught enough fragments to appreciate books by the two oldest siblings.
"Growing Up Greg" is one of the funniest books ever. Barry Williams observes about one spinoff venture, a Las Vegas act with homemade costumes, "We were like Up with People on crack."
His description of trying marijuana for the first time is priceless. Summoned unexpectedly to work, he found himself doing the old drama exercise of stressing different words in a sentence that was something like "You want me to get into the station wagon?"
Maureen McCormack's book wasn't as funny but very insightful about the challenge of her teenaged years and where it took her afterwards.
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Not to be a mercenary here, but:
It's baby boomers and their remotes and recliners
It's highly edited renovations of a fictional TV house
It's Brady alums who want a payday
Add facelifts, botox, Chip and Joanna, and stir
There are no new ideas, just renovated old ones.
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Even the idea of redoing a show is old and worn out.
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Conceptually both these shows seem brilliant. I, for one, am rooting for them both. Like most watchers of these shows in their original form, I have fond memories of the shows. And who can't sing the opening of the Brady Bunch theme song? Party on.
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There is something nice about 6 people who acted as siblings coming together 50 years after the premiere of their highly popular show to recreate the Hollywood set inside the actual house. I suspect it will be sad for viewers (and especially so for the 6 who enjoyed the real human connection) to be aware of the 3 not at home: Carol, Mike and Alice.
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The 90210 show is brilliant! And hilarious!
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Vince Gilligan wrote and directed an episode of The X-Files, Sunshine Days, from 2002 that was about a man, played by Michael Emerson, who had an extremely strange obsession with The Brady Bunch. The house, in various permutations, figured centrally in the episode:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751209/?ref_=ttep_ep18
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@maryd186 Yes! Brilliant episode!
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I’m surprised there is no mention that this month is the 50th anniversary of the debut of The Brady Bunch. I remember it well!
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Good article James, you hit the points. I think kismet is apt and an understatement. I knew there was something there when the house first went on the market. Dozens of people sent me mssgs that “your house” was up for sale. Dumb, but sort of true, I guess.
What came together is nothing short of amazing.
We were all on board... Not dead at all! The Discovery Channel/HGTV pulled off a simultaneous scheduling/construction/tv production nightmare like it was easy. One thing you missed is that this month marks the 50th anniversary of our premiere.
Kismet indeed. ML
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@Mike Lookinland Happy 50th anniversary! My nieces and nephews were all great fans, and continue to be. Thank you for commenting!
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@Mike Lookinland
Congratulations on the 50th!
Can't wait to see the show.
I'm sure @James Poniewozik didn't expect you to comment on his piece. Take that, James. Home is not where you live, but the place where you belong.
Great stuff.
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What fun!
Too bad they’re not on over-the-air TV. But maybe they’ll be streamed relatively soon!
Gabrielle Carteris aka Andrea Zuckerman was always my favorite on 90210 and it was wonderful when she became SAG president years back. Fitting given the smart, literate, politically savvy character she played on the show.
She was also just re-elected SAG president last week after a hotly contested election campaign.
See https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2019-08-29/gabrielle-carteris-wins-sag-aftra-election
Back to the Times article here and recreating nostalgia. One line in particular caught my eye.
“They’re coming home to somewhere they’ve never been.”
Shades of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High”!
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I have to say, the Brady show creeps me out. As the actors said, they had nothing to do with this house; they were just kids — in another century — paid to work on a soundstage. I feel a bit bad for them that they have to produce crocodile tears for a place they were never really in. This makes me wish for another season of Lisa Kudrow’s brilliant The Comeback, where we meet actors driven into reality TV and the circumstances that brought them to it.
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@David Law Had to produce crocodile tears? They may have never been in that house, but the interior now so closely resembles the studio sets, that it certainly can stir up emotions and nostalgia.
Haven't you ever been in a car "just like dad's". Or had a pie that "reminds you of grandma's"? They're not the exact same thing, but they make you feel good.
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I built my childhood home in Minecraft. It was blockier than I remembered.
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"Of course, as the members of the cast note, they only know that the same way we do, by having seen it on TV. They did their work on a soundstage far from there."
Not to be didactic, but Google indicates that the distance between the exterior model of the Brady House (the one renovated) and the Paramount Studios where the interior of the television house was filmed is 11.3 miles.
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@Aardvark Avenger
Your point? Distance is relative and, for many, 11.3 miles is rather far.
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I love the Brady Bunch and I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Watching Brady reruns is the TV equivalent of comfort food.
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Looking back, I suppose I wasted many hours of my childhood watching Brady Bunch episodes rather than doing something more worthy of the human brain like reading the works of George Eliot. But it was a great way for a kid to learn about how Americans appeared to view a kind of ideal family life. It was amazing that Mike and Carol almost never got angry, despite each having 3 biological kids and 3 step kids in the house.
A ludicrous fantasy, but during the years of Woodstock, the Kent State shootings, the Attica prison riot, the Watergate scandal, and last but not least the carnage of the Second Indo-China War I can understand why some people needed 30 minutes a week of fluff as relief from the real world.
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This kinda sounds like the Brady Bunch has finally discovered acid.
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The house they should be working on is the one from Green Acres.
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@CMP
"New Hope," I was just there, like 10 minutes ago.
How's the weather, in New Hope - now?
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Looking forward to a special where the Brady kids all decide to live in the same nursing home.
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After reading this, all I could think of was that line from Pet Sematary: "Sometimes dead is better."
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If the Brady House becomes a modern day Monticello could it please be put on the back of a dollar coin?
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Wait, hold on there: Alice didn’t just make pork chops. Everyone, say it along with me, through your teeth. She made: pork chops and apple sauce!
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As long as cousin Oliver isn't in it, I'm good.
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If the bobbsey twins really renovate that kitchen by installing laminate cabinets and countertops, I’ll be shocked.
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I really miss Umberto Eco.
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@profljm Me too. He would be having a field day with the way the world is today. My regular musing: WWUS (What Would Umberto Say)?
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@Jeff
Remember his insightful essay about the email leeks?
Last night I watched Richard Rawlings and his crew customize a Plymouth station wagon like the one used on The Brady Bunch. Barry Williams stopped by to check in on the build. Cool show.
From the article, it sounds like the HGTV shows will show what it takes to rebuild the house into what it would be like if in fact it contained everything that was shown in the sets used in the original show. Recreating and revisiting the past? More like just doing an interesting renovation and remodel based on a theme that many remember and can relate to.
Most of us understand that movies and TV use sets during production, that actors are acting, and that we suspend disbelief when watching the finished product. (This Old House is an exception.) I look forward to watching the HGTV show and taking it at face value. It should be fun and interesting.
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Blended families end in divorce 70% of the time. I did not know this when I moved in with my ex and our kids a few years ago. The Brady Bunch was my reference point, and I would frame our union as a modern day Brady Bunch, and half expected a life of light hearted comedy and drama to unfold. But the combined families was too much for my partner, and we split up. I'll never see the Brady Bunch or anything related to it in quite the same light again. I hope the house renovation includes a separate bedroom suite for when the husband has to sleep by himself, before he finds a new place and moves out with his kids!
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@JS—I’m so sorry, but Bob’s office would do the trick.
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I'm sorry, that photo of the Bradys. They don't look related. Are you sure you have them as adults or are those just actors? At least the ladies should resemble one another as should the gents. I mean, TV doesn't lie, does it?
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James Poniewozik, you absolutely made my day with this sentence:
?You can imagine a version of America in which the rebuilt-as-it-never-was Brady house becomes a modern-day Monticello, a cultural monument for an era in which phantom memories of TV spaces seem as real and emotionally binding as spaces we encounter every day with our meat bodies."
I hope you win a Pulitzer.
And thank you!
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Two shows I never saw - the first because, while I was first year in a suburban high school when it premiered, my life was more about teenage drama, drugs, and rock 'n' roll than the Brady kids' lives ever could have been; and the second because when it premiered it seemed to be a show based upon lives of those like the insufferably privileged children of my Marin County clients of the time, people I cared nothing about because they cared about nothing but themselves. Accordingly, I think I can miss these shows too.
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@DJ McConnell Sorry, I don't believe you've never seen The Brady Bunch. It has been re-run every early evening for the last 45 years, since back when there were only five channels to choose from.
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I like the new 90210. It’s awkward and everyone is kind of old- Gen X was never the most polished crew.
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Seems to me that most of the people who are all a-twitter over and promote these shows probably never even watched them when they were first aired. They just want to be aboard with the next shiny thing. Sheeple.
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I could only get through about 5 minutes of the BH90210 reboot...which I stumbled upon by accident. It just feels so forced.
Hopefully the Brady Bunch show will be campy like the Brady Bunch Movies. Trying too hard just never works on TV.
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The latest example of the steadfast refusal of the oldest of the Baby Boomers to grow up. Pathetic...
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
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@Rev. E. M. Camarena, PhD
Nice attitude from a member of the clergy.
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@Kim Morris
A "Reverend" from Hell's Kitchen, mind you...
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Rather liked the Brady Bunch
mostly fluff, but pleasant fluff.
Nice to know the kids all survived the last five decades.
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Perfect nostalgia event for white America in these times. I bet it gets huge ratings.
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Americans have zero interest in studying history, we elect as president an imbecile who doesn’t read books. But we are endlessly fascinated and enchanted by our own personal history. The smaller and more meaningless, the better.
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@Steven
Really? You had to find a way to reference Trump in your comment?
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@Steven Nostalgia and something fun is needed in this ever corrupt, greedy, gun killing nation. It is from a time where politeness and doing the right thing was the rule.
I am glad for it! PS: And I do read and have read history.
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OMG! The Bradys were Vals!
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Judging by the pic of the original Bradys, I'd say it isn't about the past, rather allowing us to see what happened to them -- what turned out to be their future from those olden days -- just like what happened to us in the ensuing 47 years. I think it's great!
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It's an escape to watch these shows.
I enjoy them, but please make them better.
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This is going to be a lot of fun to watch. Love that the surviving original cast all took part and have no ambivalence about being involved in another Brady reunion with a twist. It just brings back great memories of a great show with a great cast.
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@NjRN I agree! I loved the Brady Bunch as a kid. I didn't realize they were trying to totally "recreate" it - I thought they were doing 21st century updates to the house used in the exterior shots. Somehow that is even more fun. With everything terrible in the news, it's nice to watch total escapism to a simpler time.
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HGTV offers the perfect antidote to the news -- all its programs end happily. Surreal? Sure, but note that many healthcare waiting rooms now have their TVs tuned in to minimize stress and avoid conflicts over news preferences.
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@A. E. Wilburn
I agree. I find myself tuning our home's TV to HGTV often -- as an architect, I do actually enjoy some of the content from a design perspective, but often I just like that it's something that I can watch that won't keep me lying awake feeling sad or infuriated at the day's news.
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@Derek Schmidt
Me too. But worries still intrude. Desert rat that I am, I’ve wondered about those beach house buyers, who want the ocean lapping at the back porch. Have they never heard of global warming? One couple on my mind bought a nice house in the Bahamas with beaches on two sides of their property. I hope that spit of sand/land is still there.
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I grew up in a two bedroom apartment in the Bronx with my two sisters and wanted to live in a house SO badly, but I was torn between wanting to live in a Brady type house (never missed watching the Brady Bunch) or a 1930’s type colonial like my grandmother’s on Long Island. We finally ended up in a fixer-upper in Rockland County (all my parents could afford), but at least I had a closet sized bedroom to myself (my two sisters shared the third bedroom). I now live in a mid-century house (a Deck House) that I must have had in my subconscious all those years, and I am totally watching this show!
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"It is, above all, a commentary on, and example of, the strangeness and sadness of trying to force the past back to life."
Yes. Tell me about it.
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@Nancy Robertson That sentence really nails it, doesn't it?
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@Nancy Robertson
I completely concur. Has there EVER been a remake of any original series which was even in the ballpark of being half way decent compared to the original?
I always thought these "reconstructions from the past" were as embarrassing and sad to the original actors as it is to the original fans from back in the day.
Some things are just meant to be left alone in our collective memeories. Period.
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@Marge Keller
"Has there EVER been a remake of any original series which was even in the ballpark of being half way decent compared to the original?"
Yes, the author mentioned one, "Twin Peaks: The Return." Much better than the original in practically every way. This is because Showtime gave David Lynch full control over the story and production the second time around. Not like the orginial where executives from ABC attempted to ruin it.
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