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BRADY BUNCHED
Crappy TV Transcends Generation
Here’s the story… Due to a holiday scheduling conflict, I found myself celebrating one family Christmas about 10 days early this year. Not a bad thing to my mind since, A, it brought us closer to the actual birth day of our Lord (September) and, two, I could exploit the premature gift exchange for purposes of this column without fear of ruining any surprises. When I asked what my nieces wanted for Christmas, my sister told me (with a straight face, no less) seasons 2 & 3 of The Brady Bunch. They wanted what, I exclaimed, genuinely incredulous. The Brady Bunch?! You don’t mean, our Brady Bunch, surely. That is exactly what was meant. My 9 & 11 year-old nieces -- 8 & 10? 10 & 12? I know they’re almost 2 years apart -- were looking to complete their Brady Bunch collection. My disbelief was mitigated somewhat when I realized how easy it was to order these gifts on-line and have them delivered to my door (check those names off my list!) Still, I found it vaguely disturbing and somewhat annoying, this cultural appropriation. I mean, what’s the matter with kids these days? Can’t they find their own soul-deadening TV to render them emotionally stunted and intellectually bereft? How lazy can they be? When we were their age, our parents made us sit in front of the television for hours at a time, turning those five channels manually, to discover our own path to wasting our youths. The generation before us didn’t just hand over their cathode tube treasures, their Make Room for Daddy’s and Love That Bob. We had to earn it, heading off to college, bong in hand, to stare blankly at the television screen into the early morning hours to avoid writing that 1,500-word essay for a History of Revolutions course. Arguably, there have been few television shows to rival The Brady Bunch’s pure cheese factor. It takes a certain kind of bad to achieve such transcendence of awfulness. You can’t purposefully set out to attain this status. There’s a particular combination of knowingness to what you’re doing, along with an absolute obliviousness to what’s going on around you. Despite years of laboratory research into the subject, the exact ratio remains unknown. On the back cover of the DVD set, the promotional blurb welcomes you to “TV’s grooviest family”. Is that stated with tongue-firmly-in-cheek or was it dug out of the Sherwood Schwartz estate archives (Schwartz is dead, isn’t he?) No one on television was less groovy than the Brady Bunch, not even Urkel. Mary Richards was groovy. The first Lionel Jefferson was definitely groovy, perhaps not the second one but he was still groovier than anyone in the Brady clan including Greg’s rock`n’roll avatar, Johnny Bravo. Uncle Bill in Family Affair had a quiet kind of grooviness to him. Hell, compared to the Bradys, Shirley Booth’s Hazel was the epitome of groovy in a late-1950s/early-1960s suburban, subversive maid kind of way. The mystery that has stumped social scientists in their ongoing examination of The Brady Bunch phenomenon is: did the artistic brain trust involved in the show think they were groovy or did they think the audience thought the Bradys were groovy or was grooviness merely attached to them in ironic hindsight? I was about my nieces’ age (7? 8? 9? 10? 11? 12?) when The Brady Bunch made its television debut. Its non-grooviness was not particularly unique to the times as the network’s schedules were still loaded with old time Westerns, innocuous sitcoms and the soon-to-be extinct variety shows. The most cutting edge show was probably Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and it was definitely cutting edge. Get Smart had a certain studied silliness, spoofing the secret agent genre. Hogan’s Heroes had bumbling, zany Nazis! Let’s put it this way.. the hippest guy on TV at the time was Jack Lord in Hawaii Five-0. The Brady Bunch was but one of many examples of how the networks were simply choosing to ignore the social tumult that was going on at the time. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had both been dead for just over a year. Cities burned during the summer of `68. Reactionary forces pushed back, electing the very ungroovy Richard Nixon and his gang. The nuclear family -- the model of upstanding, traditional American values -- was starting to come apart at the seams. Yet, at 8 p.m. every Friday, there was this story, of a man named Brady. To be sure, this wasn’t exactly The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The Bradys were the product of a broken family, two broken families. Mike Brady was a widower; this denoted no moral failing on his part unless, of course, we assume he had killed her and gotten away with it. Since there was never so much as a hint in that direction and notoriously loose-lipped Alice remained mum on the subject, even over late night pot roast leftovers with Sam the Butcher, we must conclude the first Mrs. Brady died peacefully of natural causes. The single mother status of Carol Martin, on the other hand, was far more clouded in mystery. Rumour has it she was a divorcee but the networks were simply unprepared to broadcast that kind of failing in modern womanhood. So, she was just this lovely lady with three girls of her own. If the upstanding Mike Brady didn’t need an answer, who were we to pry? Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Despite their possibly sordid pasts, the Bradys were every bit your run-of-the-mill, middle American, television family. Father Mike wore the flair pants in the household although Mother Carol donned some fabulous pantsuits you would only have seen in the `70s. As an architect, he was the bread earner, coming home every night to a meal cooked by the live-in maid. Sometimes Carol chipped in to help with dinner in between stints.. volunteering and.. shopping for lamps that the kids would occasionally break with a football they were distinctly told not to throw around the house, rendering asunder the bond of trust that would be firmly returned in another 15 minutes or so. (No wait. A football broke Marcia’s nose. Was the lamp broken by a baseball? Was it a lamp or a vase?) To find out, Google ‘Brady Bunch’ and ‘broken lamp’. See just how much information there is out there, clogging up cyberspace. Long after the show should’ve faded into justifiable oblivion, it lives on, now entertaining the children of the children who grew up watching the show during its original run. After they unwrapped the DVDs to a moderately enthusiastic response -- dwarfed certainly by their explosive outburst at receiving the Grease DVD.. go figure -- I asked what they liked about The Brady Bunch. The youngest niece (8? 9? 10?) said it was funny. The older one (you do the math) told me it was weird. Later on, while watching part one of the Brady’s vacation to the Grand Canyon, where they find themselves locked in a ghost town jail by the voice of Mr. Magoo, one of the nieces said that could never happen nowadays because somebody would have a cell phone to call for help. Could this be the key that unlocks the secret to the longevity of The Brady Bunch appeal? Youngsters watch what they imagine things used to be like while their elders wax nostalgic at how things were never actually as they appeared on television. Generations brought together by the power of pure artifice. … and that’s the way we all became The Brady Bunch!
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