Original subtitles

[narrator] The golden age of television.

I Love Lucy didn't just change American television,

it invented American television.

[narrator] Back when one screen

brought everyone together.

Watching television was a family event.

[narrator] The shows that shaped us.

[Gary] The Brady Bunch was part of the American soul.

It's timeless.

[narrator] The familiar faces.

[man] Ralph Kramden was loved on The Honeymooners.

Pow, right in the kisser!

He was a presence.

[narrator] The unforgettable moments.

[Jeff] Dynasty captured the essence

of what the 1980s were about in America.

[narrator] These are their stories.

[Jeff] Cheers is the pinnacle

of how great the sitcom can be.

[narrator] This is TV We Love.

[narrator] 1969 was a landmark year in American history.

Life changing events like the moon landing.

[Armstrong] That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

[Jim] Woodstock, injustices such as the Vietnam War.

[Eisenhower] If we simply abandoned our effort in Vietnam,

it would enormously increase the danger.

[narrator] And then, the family we all know and love,

the Bradys.

Well, here's the story.

[narrator] Over the course of several decades,

The Brady Bunch became a part

of the fabric of American culture.

Porkchops and applesauce.

There were a lot of fans that wanted every part of us.

30 million households were watching The Brady Bunch.

[narrator] The Bradys redefined what a sitcom could be.

Hey, you guys.

Oh, my nose!

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.

[Jeff] A blended family hadn't been seen

on American television before this.

The Brady Bunch saw America before America saw itself.

[pleasant music playing]

[Hope] I remember when my dad

first had the idea for The Brady Bunch.

It was during breakfast and he was reading a paper.

And there was a little filler in the newspaper that said,

for every married couple that gets together

that have had previous husband and wife,

they bring children into the marriage.

And he said, "Wow, that's a series."

It was an immediate show in my head, immediate.

Sherwood Schwartz actually understood

what was happening in America.

Divorce was much more prevalent.

So, he immediately ran to the Writers Guild

and registered the idea for The Brady Bunch.

My fear was that everybody, every writer

would look at that little article and realize

that a sociological phenomenon

was occurring in the United States.

Sherwood Schwartz had done this show called Gilligan's Island.

Very successful show.

And so did he expect The Brady Bunch to sell? Yes.

[Hope] And he took it to all the networks

and they all said, "No."

The idea of a blended family

hadn't been seen on American television

in any real way before this.

And I think that's what scared a lot of networks away.

Divorce, even as late as the mid-60s,

was still kind of a verboten thing on TV.

Because the conventional wisdom was that

the audience wouldn't accept divorcees.

And there certainly was a conservative element

who wanted to see things more wholesome

and family-oriented and more hearkening back

to the '50s and to simpler times as they thought.

But then Yours, Mine, and Ours came out.

[Helen] I have eight children.

Eight children?

I have ten children.

[Helen] Ten?

Yours, Mine, and Ours was a movie

with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.

And it also combined families.

That was a true story of somebody

with eight kids and ten kids marrying each other

so they had 18 kids, which is nuts.

[Hope] It was a very successful movie.

My dad's version at that point was called Yours and Mine.

And that was something that everybody thought

Dad was going to be upset about.

And he ended up thinking, "Nope, I think this is going to help."

The network said, "We have that show that Sherwood pitched us."

There seems to be an audience for this kind of fare.

He was waiting for the phone to start ringing and it did.

[Sherwood] The movie had done my pilot for me.

So ABC called me and said,

"Hey, okay, we'll do it your way."

[upbeat music playing]

Because the two titles are so similar,

ABC executives were worried about that as well.

And so Yours and Mine or any form of that title

is not going to work, so he retitled it.

The Brady Bunch wasn't the original title.

It's hard to believe.

When I first heard about this show,

it wasn't called The Brady Bunch.

When I got the first script, I believe

"Bradleys" was on the cover page.

It might have been Bradley at one point.

But as I recall, it was Brady

and Brady Brood, which just seemed heavy.

He originally wanted to call it The Brady Bunch.

But the network said at that time,

"bunch" was used for war movies, it was used for westerns.

Everybody I knew voted for "bunch."

They thought it was a funnier word.

It was a better word.

And it's funny now because "bunch,"

because of Brady Bunch, is warm.

Everybody thinks of, you know,

a "bunch," how cute that is.

So Sherwood Schwartz had his pilot script.

The first thing he did was set about casting the kids.

[Barry] Everybody who had ever thought about

being on television was being considered for this thing.

Sherwood spent hours and hours and hours

and saw hundreds of kids for these roles.

[Eve] And they essentially had a sound stage

and they had tons of children grouped into age groups

and hair color groups.

He actually cast two sets of kids.

He cast blonde boys and blonde girls

and brunette boys and brunette girls

because he wanted the hair colors of the girls

to match the mother and he wanted the hair colors

of the boys to match the father.

There are three blonde boys who could have been

and three dark-haired girls who could have been.

There was one kid that was on both lists

and that was Mike Lookinland.

Well, I just walked in the other room

to toot my kazoo

because I like to walk when I toot.

I do know for a fact that Bobby Brady

was not a dark-haired little boy

and they actually dyed his hair

because they wanted him so badly.

Some seasons his hair looked darker than others.

Season one, it was a little Dracula,

but that's only in hindsight.

I bought it hook, line, and sinker for years.

He's too good a selection to dismiss

because his hair wasn't the right color.

What's wrong with the hair of red?

Most importantly, he wanted kids

that were real kids.

They're not show business kids.

He didn't want kid actors.

He wanted kids who could act.

That's very different.

He got that kid because I wasn't an actor at all.

I mean, I barely could speak, so...

My dad was extremely enthusiastic about Susan Olsen.

When Susan Olsen came in and was laser-focused on Dad,

she talked about a show that she had just done

where she got to ride a horse.

It just charmed my dad.

She said that, "I was on an episode of Gunsmoke."

I didn't have to go any further.

I've been practicing. Now, I speak really swell.

I mean, Cindy, you just look

and you just fall in love with her.

Please, Daddy, don't interrupt my hersel.

Hersel?

That's actor talk.

Sherwood wanted the older boy to be a guy

who had a take-charge attitude,

a leader, and that's what led to Barry Williams.

I can remember when I heard about getting to part.

It was a Friday, it was my 14th birthday.

September 30th. I was just thrilled.

That's why I think you should elect me

President of the Student Body.

Thank you.

My favorite character on the show,

gotta go with Alice.

I just adored her.

Alice, the housekeeper, is a really important element

of The Brady Bunch, she's really the comic relief.

[Kate] Alice was my favorite.

She said, "Oh, that's my two-way stretch.

I think it just went three ways."

That's my two-way stretch. I think it just went three ways.

Ann B. Davis and Alice were certainly

willing to be the brunt of the joke.

-Now be careful. -I've done this a lot.

-Where? -At YWCA.

[Ann] I wish I had an Alice.

Everybody I've ever met wished they had an Alice,

including Alice.

The original choice for Carol Brady

was a very great comedic actress named Joyce Bulifant.

I went in with the children, and they would put them

next to me to see if the girls looked like me.

[Hope] But the network wanted Florence Henderson,

and my dad actually wanted her, too,

because she was wonderful.

What's wrong?

Oh, nothing, nothing at all.

Aha, that's the kind of nothing

that bothers me the most.

[Florence] I became sort of the stability of the show,

and I think Sherwood saw that,

that I could be very funny, but I could also

bring the empathy necessary for a show like that to make it.

Jan, you're not in anybody's shadow.

Marcia's three years older than you.

She should have more to show for herself.

I've heard Gene Hackman

was a definite possibility for Mike Brady.

Talk about a missed opportunity, Gene Hackman.

And can you imagine being the network executive

when Gene Hackman suddenly becomes a huge movie star,

has to say, "I turned him down to be a Brady."

The studio and the network had Robert Reed,

who had just come off The Defenders

and had a very nice following from that show.

Judy, I think you better call my father.

Tell him I'm at the DA's office

and tell him I'm in a bit of trouble.

They wanted him to be Mr. Brady.

I remember the screen tests, and I watched all of them,

and I thought that Robert Reed was a little stiff.

Even though he's only been my dad for a short time,

no father could be a realer father than Michael Brady.

The casting of Robert Reed was easier for the studio

because the studio had a deal with Robert Reed.

They were paying him.

He was a New York-trained actor.

He was a wonderful classical actor

and had done a lot of theater.

So this was, you know, somebody that,

you know, had done serious work.

He really considered himself a serious actor

and didn't really think that this show

would be right for him.

Sherwood gave me the plot of it, and it sounded wonderful.

He put it together with statistics of broken families,

and so I said, it's going to be comedic,

but not, you know, it's going to be lifelike.

Then I got the script of it,

and it was one gag line to another.

I thought, "This is,

well, I don't think this has much of a chance."

But it did, and he ended up

fighting with my dad for the next six years.

♪ Here's the story ♪

[ The Brady Bunch theme song playing]

♪ Here's the story ♪

♪ Of a lovely lady ♪

♪ Who was bringing up three very lovely girls ♪

The '60s went out with such a roar,

and here come the Bradys in '69.

♪ It's the story of a man named Brady ♪

♪ Who was busy with three boys of his own ♪

[Hope] My dad put together the lyrics,

and not that long ago,

when we got the piano from my parents' house,

we opened the piano bench, and there were handwritten

original lyrics to The Brady Bunch.

Sherwood Schwartz was a real proponent of the TV theme song,

and I think he had learned that lesson with Gilligan's Island.

When he was trying to sell Gilligan's Island to CBS,

the network executives were worried people are going to

tune in to say to him, "Who are these seven people?"

So he came up with this sea chanty that he wrote.

♪ Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale ♪

♪ A tale of a fateful trip ♪

♪ That started from this tropic port ♪

♪ Aboard this tiny ship ♪

And it did what I said had to be done

to avoid the kind of exposition

that CBS felt would be necessary to explain

why those seven people were on the island.

[thunder rumbling]

♪ The weather started getting rough ♪

♪ The tiny ship was tossed ♪

He knows how to tell a story in a song,

and that's a skill.

♪ Here on Gilligan's Isle ♪

He applied that same lesson to The Brady Bunch.

♪ All of them had hair of gold ♪

♪ Like their mother ♪

♪ The youngest one in curls ♪

Except the last season she had braids,

and so they had to curl the bottom of the braids.

[laughing]

It's fantastic.

♪ They were four men ♪

♪ Living all together ♪

♪ Yet they were all alone ♪

Back then, you would be hard-pressed to find somebody

who could not sing the entire song

from start to finish.

It's a perfect encapsulation of what the show is.

It's a story, and you know exactly what the show's about.

♪ 'Til the one day when the lady met this fellow ♪

♪ And they knew it was much more than a hunch ♪

And he rhymed "bunch" with "hunch."

"They knew that it was much more than a hunch."

I said, "Why did you put that in there?"

He said, "Well, I needed a rhyme for 'bunch.'"

♪ That's the way we all became The Brady Bunch ♪

I said, "But you can't put that in there just because

you wanted to put that in there.

He says, "When you write a song

that's as successful as that, talk to me about it."

♪ The Brady Bunch The Brady Bunch ♪

As the show was starting to go on,

it became that the kids who became the stories

and the parents overlooked them.

So in the second year,

we had the kids sing the song.

"That's the way we became The Brady Bunch."

♪ That's the way we all became The Brady Bunch ♪

♪ The Brady Bunch The Brady Bunch ♪

Boy, if I didn't know you were gonna give me a free record,

I'd offer to pay for one.

♪ That's the way we became ♪

♪ The Brady Bunch ♪

But then how that song was visually manifest,

the way they animated, actual pictures of the actors,

and then the two come together with the lyrics,

absolutely brilliantly done.

One day, I came into the living room,

and Dad was at the bridge table

drawing a diagram of how he could get nine people

into boxes at the beginning and could see their faces.

There was something about the symmetry of The Brady Bunch

that was very satisfying as a child.

Three blonde girls with three brunette boys,

Mom and Dad both blonde and brunette.

And then there was Alice,

you know, balancing out the 9th square.

Fantastic, right?

Filming those credits was probably

one of the most uncomfortable things of all

that we had to do because there's really nothing to do

but be on a chair and look around.

Insidiously difficult.

You don't know what you're doing.

Nobody's really describing to you

clearly what you're doing.

So someone would say, "And down."

And you'd go, down.

"Look up." Okay, don't look that far up.

"Bottom right." And you go...

and pretend to be making, you know, contact with Cindy.

And then I'd look over here, and they'd go,

"No, no, Alice is not in there yet.

Okay, right. [chuckling]

They weren't really even sure

where we were gonna be in those boxes.

I think the first season, we were both looking this way,

Ann, I mean, like Peter...

looks right, I believe, right?

To the successful launch of Project Brady Bunch.

Here, here.

In the premiere episode of The Brady Bunch,

we get to see the family actually come together.

Now it's just the beginning. For both of us.

Uh-uh. For all of us.

The whole blooming Brady Bunch.

[Jim] And then we see the wedding

of Carol Martin and Mike Brady.

Looks like it would have been a lovely affair

had Fluffy the Cat and Tiger the Dog

not triggered a chase that culminated

in the wedding cake sliding off the table.

Oh, Mike, thank goodness you saved the cake!

-Oh! -Oh, Mike!

So it underscores the theme of the show,

that this is a family that's only complete

when they're together, because Carol and Mike

then schlep all the way home and pick up the kids

and Alice to go on their honeymoon.

It's a honeymoon for eight.

You mean a honeymoon for nine, Mommy.

-You mean a honeymoon for ten. -[cat meows]

-Fluffy! -[dog barking]

-Tiger! -Eleven.

-Don't forget Alice! -That makes 12!

In a sense, The Brady Bunch was the original modern family.

It is sort of a nuclear family,

but it's a nuclear blended family.

And it's really one of the first blended families

that we all got comfortable with.

You know, the only negative thing about the show

really was the fact that Bob and Sherwood did not get along.

Robert Reed tried to get fired several times in the first year.

He fought with my dad about every little detail.

He was very picky and very insistent

that if it didn't match what he felt was logical,

he was going to make a scene about it.

I remember the strawberry jam instance.

-Hey, what's cooking? -Oh, hi, honey.

Alice and I are making

strawberry preserves for the charity auction.

[Hope] Robert Reed was supposed to walk into the room

and say, "Smells like strawberry heaven in here."

Let me put it this way.

Yes?

"Strawberries, when they're cooking, have no odor,

so I refuse to do that line."

They had to rewrite the line.

I do believe I've died and gone to strawberry heaven.

You have Sherwood Schwartz is a joke writer

and a television sitcom writer,

and Robert Reed coming from classically trained acting,

and it's oil water.

Robert Reed was a stickler for accuracy about everything,

which sometimes gets in the way of comedy.

I can see both sides of it, because, you know,

when you go into a show,

you don't know that it's going to become iconic.

All you know is this is the job you have.

He wasn't trying to be obnoxious.

It wasn't in him to not find the core of the reality.

You know, I'd have to go every so often,

"Bob, this is comedy.

This is not Shakespeare."

You know, it's a situation comedy for television.

[Christopher] But he was a loving dad.

That's how he treated us.

There might have been issues with him and Sherwood.

That all happened sort of out of earshot from us.

It's not a silly show, really.

There are silly moments in it,

but there are real family connections,

which, you know, he took seriously.

I sympathize with him, because here he is,

the father of America,

and he can't come out of the closet.

[Florence] He's a very proud man, a wonderful actor,

and a wonderful human being, and who happened to be gay.

And none of us ever cared.

It was not an issue.

It was just not-- Wasn't important.

Well, you have a soft heart. Lips to match.

My goodness, aren't we affectionate tonight?

Not just tonight, every night.

Because I love you, darling.

[laughter]

Robert Reed, I think, was in a tough position.

He was playing this more wholesome than wholesome guy

in an era where being gay

was considered a shameful secret.

Then to go to the fame of being America's perfect dad,

that everybody thought he had all the answers,

I think there's a growing dissonance between the actor

and the character that makes it tough.

Our show was slow to find its audience.

Brady Bunch was reviewed as the worst show of the year.

The show was okay, but that's all it was.

And then there was a question about

a pickup for a second year.

And it was never a critical hit,

because it was considered so juvenile.

Of course, the nature of our show

was bigger than life, it was exaggerated.

The situations were comedic.

Hence, sitcom.

Looks like I'm the one who's the goat wreck, Al.

[goat bleating]

You can say that again.

[goat bleating]

This is television back when we used to call it

the boob tube and the idiot box.

And I'm not saying these shows were idiotic or whatever.

They did what they did brilliantly.

This is the sitcom at its absolute sitcom-iest.

Alice.

I know, I know, I forgot one little thing.

-I don't know how to drive. -[laughter]

My father really didn't care what the critics said

as long as the people loved it.

During their original run, they weren't a ratings hit.

That doesn't mean that there weren't millions of people,

particularly kids, who were rabid for the show.

A lot of people ended up seeing themselves

in this blended family in a way that probably

network executives never expected.

We first became aware of the kind of impact

and the enormous viewership that we had

when we would go outside the soundstage.

30 million households were watching The Brady Bunch.

All of a sudden it's like you're being stared at.

[Barry] When we went to Cincinnati's Kings Island,

we really got a taste of what was going on.

That is the heartland of America.

They're the people that were keeping us on the air

There were a lot of fans that wanted every part of us.

I mean, hair can get pulled, costumes can get ripped.

[Christopher] And then all of a sudden,

there becomes this need for security.

We're just staying in a hotel, and if fans wanted to come

into the hotel and knock on your door, they could.

[kids chanting] One, two, three, kick!

Hey, you kids, what are you doing there?

[boy] Uh, cleaning the garage!

-[girl] Yeah! -[laughter]

In that period of time as well,

there became this desire to make us

into a singing and dancing group.

♪ I think I'll go for a walk outside ♪

♪ Now the summer sun's calling my name ♪

When the Brady kids started to sing,

we were so excited.

♪ Everybody's smiling, sunshine day ♪

And the songs were weird and wonderful and catchy.

♪ Sha na na na na na na na na ♪

♪ Sha na na na na ♪

♪ When it's time to change ♪

-♪ It's time to change ♪ -Yep?

You got the choreography down!

I'm a super fan!

[cheering and applause]

Terrific!

The house was as much a character as the people in it.

It's very famous.

Dad himself found the outside of the house,

just driving around, and he said, "That's the house."

[Barry] We call the house the tenth character

because it was so significant.

But it was not where they shot the show.

They only used the exteriors.

We shot at Paramount Studios, stage five.

A couple of years ago, HGTV renovated the house

to look inside the way

everybody in America remembered it.

It's surreal.

You're just walking straight into an episode.

I was lucky enough to see it in person,

and I kind of lost my mind.

It's kind of the best experience of my life.

When I first walked through that door,

I felt like I was coming home.

[jittery music playing]

The Brady staircase is iconic.

You saw the staircase,

you know exactly what show you're watching.

Come on, you guys! Hurry up.

You're going to be late for school!

Greg was hogging the bathroom all morning!

There are six kids in two bedrooms.

Why the hell were six children crammed into two small rooms?

That's the big burning question we all have.

Don't get me started, Mike was an architect,

and this is the house.

And one bathroom.

[Kate] The girls would fight with the boys

for space in the bathroom.

The focus really was on the kids and their lives.

This is too a part of the genius

of Lloyd Schwartz and Sherwood Schwartz both.

The way to keep us connected

to what we were doing here was to let us be kids.

Any of you monsters want a hot dog?

-Thanks, Alice. -Thanks, Alice.

-Hm-mm. -Thanks, Alice.

[Lloyd] And Dad said, "I want you to be

in charge of those kids."

I basically would look at the show

from the kid's point of view,

and Dad would have the point of view

of the adult's point of view.

I mean, I love Lloyd, he was like an older brother.

He was a big kid himself.

You know where Marge is?

She's the girl at the football booth

who's filling in for her brother.

Oh, yeah, she's inside the employees' area.

I just treated it a little bit like summer camp.

I just wanted them to be kids,

which caused problems later on for me and for them.

You know, there's a lot of waiting around,

and, you know, what do you do?

Well, adventure, right?

I mean, it's Paramount Studios.

[chuckles] Let's go!

♪

I got a call from the president

of the studio, "What's the deal?"

"Well, the kids were all running around."

And he said, "You know, you can't have them do this.

They're very expensive property."

And that just put my hackles up, and I said,

"They're not property, they're kids.

That's what kids do."

And he said, "You're not going to change that?"

I said, "No, I'm not going to change that.

If you want it done any differently,

you're going to have to fire me."

Well, he didn't. It was pretty ballsy.

[Barry] Lloyd, to his credit, and Sherwood

both made sure the studio wouldn't intervene,

and they let us go, and we had a ball.

Robert Reed gave us all Super 8 movie cameras.

I took it everywhere.

[Lloyd] As they started getting older, my challenge was,

in some ways, to keep them off of one another.

This is my room and I'm not budging.

And I say it's my room, and I'm not budging.

[Lloyd] The episode I directed was called "Room at the Top,"

and there was a scene where Barry

came into Maureen's room, and she's sitting there,

and he sits down on the bed next to her.

Hey, uh, wait a minute. [scoffs]

I didn't mean to make you cry.

I remember this scene. I remember the day.

Lloyd discovered that there might have been

a little bit too much attraction between brother and sister.

Maureen McCormick was very, very attractive.

I dare to say that if you find anybody

who grew up watching the shows,

their first crush was probably Marcia Brady.

I remember being probably most interested

in Maureen McCormick at the time.

Especially as she grew up,

because we were roughly the same age.

So I was, you know, gravitated right to her,

and it was coming out in our scenes together.

[laughs] I'm sitting a little too close,

leaning in a little too far.

And we finished the scene,

and it was kind of like steam there.

[Barry] And he was right. It's very hard to hide.

That's chemistry.

Lloyd was on the set, and he pulled me aside

and said, "Good scene.

And I just want you to keep in mind here

that she is your sister."

There were so many iconic moments.

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.

Well, all I hear all day long at school

is how great Marcia is at this

or how wonderful Marcia did that.

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.

Hey, you guys. Oh, my nose!

Oh, my nose.

Who could love the Brady Bunch

and not love that episode, right?

Hi, Alice. What's for dinner?

-Pork chops. -Pork chops, huh?

So I was doing an impersonation of Humphrey Bogart.

Pork chops and applesauce.

Ain't that swell?

That as a slogan, as, you know, sort of your...

[laughs] ...the thing you're known by.

But those moments become important

because the audience determines that it is.

One of my favorite Brady episodes

is when Jan wants to be a cheerleader,

and she's terrible.

And she starts practicing with the mops.

Down here, they're mops, but up here, they're pom poms.

When asked, each one of us,

what her favorite episode was, we say "Hawaii."

-Where are we going? -[kids shouting]

-Hawaii! -Hawaii!

But it's not because of the content of the episode.

It's just that we were in Hawaii.

Never been to Hawaii, so I had an image

of what it would be, and the only image I had, though,

was of The Brady Bunch visit to Hawaii.

Smile. Say belly button.

Belly button!

[Barry] We went to Hawaii, and I got to surf

on Oahu in a restricted area for those two days

when we were filming.

That was probably nirvana for me.

The show ended up being the victim of ratings.

When shows age, they age.

But shows with kids tend to age faster.

In the fifth season, the executives at Paramount

felt that the kids were getting a little older,

and so it was time to find a way

to bring in a seventh Brady child.

We're gonna have an addition to the family.

Greg Brady was about to graduate high school,

and so we had to get some youth into the show.

-Here we are. -[Carol] Oliver!

-[kids] Hey, Oliver. -[Carol] Oh, hi, honey.

And we knew Robbie Rist,

and we thought he'd be perfect for this.

[laughter]

[Marcia] Oliver!

Now, I have to apologize to Robbie

because he's considered a syndrome,

you know, for shows when they're in trouble.

It's become kind of parlance in television that

when a show is getting old and they start trying

to pull desperate tricks, they're pulling a Cousin Oliver.

[Oliver] Better not come near me, Aunt Carol.

Why not?

[Oliver] Something bad will happen.

I'm a jinx.

[Christopher] By the fourth and fifth season,

there wasn't really none of that lesson stuff anymore,

and it got kind of caricaturish, it got silly.

Are you friend or enemy?

Well, I'm a friend. Welcome to Earth.

Earth?

Is that what they call this planet?

What ended up being our final episode,

Bobby's sent away for a hair tonic.

-Bobby, not so much. -It's all right.

Uses Greg as his guinea pig and turns my hair orange.

Oh, no.

-[laughter] -Orange?

Robert Reed did not find that premise believable.

For some reason, that of all things

made Robert Reed say, "That is a line too far."

A tonic that turns hair orange? I don't believe it.

I felt like, well, how is this

less believable than many of the other things?

Robert Reed is furious at this whole thing

and writes a long diatribe about this

and why such and such and such and such.

"It can't happen. It's got to be realistic."

Robert Reed refused to do the show, period.

He went to his dressing room and waited for Dad

to come and beg him to be in the show.

And Dad didn't do that.

Dad immediately rewrote the script

and took Robert Reed out of the whole episode.

Oh, Greg, you made me so proud of graduating with honors.

Too bad your father was out of town and had to miss it.

He really threw a stink, he kind of just stood around

and stuck his tongue out at people from behind the camera

and distracted the cast for the rest of the day.

So Paramount said to me,

we will send two guards down

and carry him off the stage

if that's the only way to get him off the stage.

I said, no way.

Not in front of those kids.

The whole show is about getting along

and this was a real good example of not getting along.

So, it was uncomfortable and unfamiliar,

really, for us and I think unfortunate.

And it was said that should the show come back

for a sixth season, it would have a new dad.

I mean, Bob Reed was such a pain

that Paramount recognized it

and ABC recognized it and authorized me,

if the show were to continue, to replace him.

I don't know how well America would have accepted that though

because we love Robert Reed as Mike Brady.

But we never had to find out

because the show ended up being canceled.

[Lloyd] I remember we were at a banquet

and the vice president of Paramount came over to us

and said, "Well, we fought the good fight."

And that's how we found out. It was over.

It was a call out of the blue.

And it was from a network executive who explained to me

that he was there with a bottle of scotch

and he wanted to let me know that our show had been canceled.

I was completely blindsided by it.

[Christopher] It was just inglorious, I mean,

it's not like there's a party.

It's not like there's an ending.

It's just all of a sudden, you break,

you're on hiatus and you're never coming back.

I drove to Paramount Studios

and went straight over to my parking spot

and the nameplate had been painted over.

[cackling] My name was no longer there.

It was somebody else's.

That was when it hit me.

And nobody said goodbye and I took it personally.

When the show was canceled and a lot of people thought

that's the end of the Bradys. [chuckles]

Everybody was so wrong.

The Brady Bunch has been a lot of things,

but over isn't one of them.

The Brady Bunch did not become a massive hit

until it hit syndication.

It's a rerun. I'll tell you all about it.

The Brady Bunch may have debuted on network TV

from 1969 to 1974,

but The Brady Bunch became the grip on the soul

of a couple of generations of Americans years after that.

When you go from being a show that's only on

once a week on a Friday night

to being a show that's readily accessible

because when you come home from school

it's right there in that half hour,

that just opened up the audience

to a whole new generation of kids.

My sister and I, we used to be able to tell you

what episode it was before they opened their mouth.

The Brady Bunch was part of the fabric

of the American soul.

Then, the Bradys continued on

in every possible shape and form.

[announcer] Ladies and gentlemen,

The Brady Bunch.

Right after the show ended, they did this

Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

♪ You've got the cutest little, baby face ♪

[Jim] Mike and Carol, having been this normal

American mom and dad, all of a sudden

they're doing a variety show around a pool

and they're in sequined outfits tap dancing.

-What? -[Kate] It was almost like

somebody did too many drugs

and they made too many weird decisions.

But that's just me. I still loved it.

But yeah, it was woo. It was out there.

So of all the derivations of The Brady Bunch,

that's the one we never had anything to do with.

I saw half of one. Didn't make any sense.

You're a chicken. I'm a rabbit.

-[scattered laughter] -Why are we doing this?

And that was as much as I've had anything to do with that.

I'm blamed for it a lot.

Why'd you do that Brady Bunch Variety Hour?

I didn't do it.

We followed them from then on.

We followed them through the Brady Brides.

[narrator] But what better beginning

than a double wedding for two beautiful sisters,

Marcia and Jan.

We followed them through a Christmas movie in 1988.

20 years ago, Carol and you three girls

and I and you three boys

came together and in time became one.

They were then ripe for parodying

with The Brady Bunch movies of the '90s.

Dad and I got together and we realized

there's not really a movie there unless we do it as a satire.

And I give Dad a huge amount of credit

because we would be the first people to satirize ourselves.

And so we wrote a satire and it got a green light.

And then as what happens in studios and things

and a new president came in and she immediately

threw out our script.

[Lloyd] The new president from Paramount came in.

She thought The Brady Bunch was gonna be a hit

so she brought in two other writers

who wrote it as a vicious kind of satire.

Ours was an affectionate satire and we resented that

and we got attorneys involved

and they said, Paramount has the copyright.

They can do whatever they want,

except my clients are individuals

and who plan on going on every talk show

telling people not to see this movie.

Which that got Paramount upset

and so they took all of our notes

and turned it in basically into the movie you saw.

If we don't raise $20,000 in one week we'll have to move.

Go to a new school.

Make new friends.

But Jan, you don't have any friends.

When I read the script I was kind of delighted to see

that they had put in this twist on it

which was to leave the Bradys trapped

in the '70s and everybody else had moved forward.

I thought they were fun. They were so well cast.

Shelley Long was really great.

[Shelley] I knew about the show but I didn't know the show

so I had to really learn her character,

her movements, her voice.

-[laughter] -Oh, Alice,

what would we do without you?

There's two different versions of Mike: mine and Robert Reed.

Mine is a total with love

and with the tip of the cap, a total satire.

[Kate] Christine Taylor was an amazing Marcia Brady.

Dinner's ready! Oh, my nose!

Now, I'll never be a teen model!

Everybody in that cast, they were really great.

Sure, Jan.

Do you know who'd love to hear about this?

-[Bradys] Grandma! -Hey!

[overlapping shouting]

We knew that Mike was widowed.

Carol Brady was Carol Martin,

we knew that before she got married

but we never really heard what had happened

to Mr. Martin, the girl's father.

This is a big question.

Was she divorced? Was she widowed?

Well, it turns out we find out from the movies

that Carol was indeed a divorcee

and that her husband, Roy Martin, was still alive.

I'm looking for Carol Brady. My name's Roy Martin.

I'm her husband.

And when he came into the movies,

he was played by Tim Matheson, who ironically

was one of the actors from Yours, Mine, and Ours.

Back in 1990 in Chicago,

two sisters put Brady episodes on stage

and they had a bunch of Second City actors

do the show with the music and not change a thing.

♪ 'Til the one day when the lady met this fellow ♪

♪ And they knew that it was much more than a hunch ♪

It was a huge hit immediately.

I mean, people were lining up down the street.

I'm ready to tell you a damn joke.

-A telegram? -[laughter]

The first Greg Brady when we did the show was Steve Carell.

Mrs. Brady was Jane Lynch.

Oh Martha, I've got to go.

Yeah, Mike just called me. I think something's burning.

So I was Jane's understudy, Mrs. Brady's understudy,

and then eventually I got to take over as Alice

for almost a year, and we would change episodes every week.

It was kind of a way to share something together

that had not really happened in that way.

[cheering and applause]

There are phrases that went into our lexicon

that come from that show, and certainly moments.

So, many visuals and phrases

that really are stuck in our minds for decades,

and I think will continue to be,

and are still parodied today in pop culture.

♪ Here's the story of a man named Brady ♪

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.

-Jan, this isn't about you. -It never is!

♪ That's the way we all became The Marvel Bunch ♪

There are literally chemical changes that happen

when that nostalgic vibe is touched.

We started all those years ago, more than 50,

and the heart light still goes on.

This show has a life of its own.

The Brady family is a part of Americana.

The ideas and the themes that were explored

on The Brady Bunch are timeless,

and the morality of the show is timeless.

There's a good message in this Brady thing,

and apparently a lot of America and the world

needed it as well, and that was their attraction to it.

But I think the legacy is more one of childhood memories

of spending time with people who saw our problems

and solved them and made us feel like ours were solvable.

The Brady Bunch saw America before America saw itself.

It had so many of the great themes we all live with.

Sibling rivalry, blended families,

loving mom and dad at the center.

It was so relatable.

If I happen to be flipping channels

and it's on, I'll probably watch the whole thing.

I can't help it. It's like an old friend.

♪