The Brady Bunch: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and lin loan facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We are your blended family of banality, your step siblings of stories. You're Marcia, Marcia Marsha's of Minutia. You're An B. Davis's of the Deep Dive, speaking to you live from the confines of a three by three square grid. My name is Jordan Runtug, and I'm Alex Eigel. And folks gather around because here's the story of a man named Brady, a lovely lady, and six adorable kids. We're gonna talk all about the way they became The Brady Bunch. It's certainly on the Mount Rushmore beloved classic sitcom, despite the fact that it's kind of not a good show. But I say that with love because look, I was raised by Nick at Knight, and I will go to bat for anything that was part of their programming, especially during the block Party Summer era. The Brady Bunch was one of those shows that I think I rarely sought out, but I washed a lot simply because it was there. I called this the sprite phenomenon. It's what you drink at the birthday party when the two lead bottles of coke and rupie are empty. Because I mean, did you know anybody who actively seeks out sprite? I saw it out. Sprat was my go to hangover here. Oh well, okay, sprite causes alcohol will be broken down more quickly metabolized more quickly. Is that true according to some study in Japan that I just made up. No, I actually did look this up. Yeah, so my go to hangover cure was coconut water and sprite. Oh wow, Okay, all right, they could have gone it was Sierra miss. It just kind of flies in the face of my theory. But mellow yellow. Mellow yellow fits more into the Brady Bunch aesthetics. So we're gonna go with rebrand this as the Melo yellow theory. Okay. Anyway, the point stands, Brady Bunch just sort of absorbed it. But obviously there are super fans still to this day, nearly fifty four years after it pimired on ABC. You know, it's a dose of nostalgia that goes down easily. But it's unique in that it's nostalgia isn't tethered to the generation who came of age with The Brady Kids. Show creator Sherwood Shorts had a very simple explanation for why this show continues to endure across multiple generations. He said, I think it's because the stories are drawn from a child's point of view, which is rare in television history. High go. I know, we talked about this earlier and I correctly deduced that this was not a big one for you. But surely you must have some thoughts or memories on the Brady Bunch, even just through culturals. Moses, Yeah, I mean, maybe just rerun blocks again, like just on TV when you're a kid and you don't realize that death is coming for all of us and you just while away long hours watching idiot stuff. No. I actually my most enduring memory of the Bradies is the surreal life Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, when the one Brady fell in love with that mean model lady Drink Curry Drink Curry, America's Next Top Model season one winner Adrian Curry, who was just chased off of Twitter for saying mean things about a woman on the biggest show in the world right now anyway, Um, yeah, I remember watching her and who's it not Wayne Knight, Christopher Knight, christ Peter Ready Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and then he seemed like such a nice guy on that show. Actually he was like the really nice Yeah, that's it. That's all I read, that's all. And they the movies, right, they came out when we were when we were kids. When did they reboot that? They came out when we were kids, But I think ninety five is when the movie came out. We're not gonna go really touch on the movies in this episode too much because because they were more of an affectionate parody, I would say, damn, Shelley Long was Carol Brady, Gary Cole was Mike Brady, Christine Taylor was Marsha h yeah huh yeah. I just qualified it because it was a parody and not like a properized continuation of the series. But also I was lazy because there's like twenty three pages of Brady Bunch stuff to get through and I just didn't need another thing. Yeah, it's true, I should stop derailing this go ahead, but yeah, an important part of my appreciation for the Brady Bunch was not only these movies that were kind of in the ether, but the irreverent Nick and Knight promos that sort of lovingly teased the show. There was a cover of the ramones I want to be Sedated that they changed the lyrics to make it I want to be a Brady. Do you remember this? No, it sounds terrible, It's a guy. I want to be a Brady. It's great. I want to cruise around. Pretty good, medium, funny, And there was a whole recurring bit where all the cast pretended that there was a long lost Brady sister named Phoebe and it was just like a little like in between shows bumper bit, But they had the whole cast there and they committed to it, and I, you know, I appreciated that it kind of imbued a little bit of a reverence into this very straight seeming, sunny pop cultural entity. And to me, it was almost like what Mystery Signs Theater three thousand did to those old bad movies. It was, you know, the Brady bunch was just so rigidly straight laced that it almost seemed subversive, which is something that I very much connect with too. Maybe it's because I sort of how I see myself, but yeah, the Brady Bunch movies in the nineties also played with this. The show was just mocked for being so supremely uncool, but it was done with affection, and you got the sense that the cast were in on the joke too, So I appreciated that. And also, as is so often the case, the more squeaky clean the production, the more raunchy the stories behind the scene. It's it's the Mickey Mouse Club rule. That's my second rule that I've made up off the top of my head in this episode, and we are five minutes in, and you know, I got to say it's worth noting. I'm a member of a blended family myself, and I'd argue that there's something aspirational and maybe even inspirational about the Brady Bunch despite its lightweight status. We forget that this family, especially the kids, went through some sort of traumatic upheaval, death, divorce. They don't really dwell on what in the plot before they arrived at this very cozy suburban shangra law. As you recall, that's the way they became the Brady Bunch, So damn it, I'd say they earn their boring, slightly lobotomized lives after whatever hardship that came before. I think that the fact that they found peace and their lives were happy enough that every problem could be solved in twenty minutes or less. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing to see, especially for kids at a time these days, when families look all kinds of different ways, and you know, for nineteen sixty nine, it was quietly radical that this blended family could be just as boring and lame as a traditional nuclear family. So I think that's powerful, fair thank you. So that in mind, let's press on from the weird pseudo ancestral relationships between the kids and the cast. I probably should have put a little space between my heartfelt sentiment and incest. I should should have put that one later in the deck. To the time that Mike Brady was such a pain in the ass that the show's creator planned to kill him off, to the several ways that the actors nearly died while shooting the show, the episode that Greg Brady filmed while high, the real life view between two of the Brady sisters, the Curse of cousin Oliver, the Insane Brady Bunch spin off drama, and the New York mayor who gave Carol Brady an std. Here's everything you didn't know about the Brady Bunch. So here's the story. You have to stop using. The story The Brady Bunch began in nineteen sixty five when television producer Sherwood Schwartz came across a small article in the La Times. It was just a tiny filler piece, some four lines long, and it said that in that year, in nineteen sixty five, thirty one percent of all marriages involved people who had a child or children from a previous marriage. And Sherwood Schwartz later said it was just a statistic stick, but to me, it indicated a remarkable sociological change in our country. Thirty one percent is approximately one third of all marriages. That's a huge statistic. And Schwartz by this point was already a television power player, having created Gilligan's Island, which was a hit at this time, and this article gave him an idea for a new show about a blended family, and he wrote a pilot script that he called Yours and Mine, and he shopped it around to all three major television networks he had. All three networks wanted to make some major changes to the plot. One network wanted to delete a scene with the kids a company the newly married parents on their honeymoon, which admittedly is kind of weird, and the network executives deemed it unrealistic. And then there was another network who didn't want to marriage at all, but a prolonged courtship, which kind of makes a certain amount of sense. Weddings could be a huge mid series draw, and it seemed a shame to blow this gimmick on the first episode. The episode where Genie from My Dream of Genie married Major Nelson in nineteen sixty nine was a huge ratings getter, for example, although many fans, including Barbara Eden A Jeanie herself, thought that the marriage ruined the show by eliminating the sexual tension. Also see the Office with Jim and Pam after they got married. I tuned out. Most people tuned out, but anyway, I digress. Cheers Jenna Sherwood. Schwartz went into television because he couldn't get into med school because there were quotas on the amount of Jewish students med schools could accept. I did not I knew his brother wrote for like Bob Hope, yeah, yeah, wow, that is wild. We have anti Semitism to thank for the Brady Bunch, as you were. Sherwood Schwartz didn't want to make any changes to his scripts, so he basically told the networks no, thank you. And luckily for him, he was flushed with Gilligan's Island Bucks and he didn't have to do anything he didn't want to, so he shoved the idea. But then three years later, in nineteen sixty eight, United Artists released a film called Yours, Mine and Rs, starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, and this movie told the story of a widow with eight children who married a father of ten. And this film was a huge success, becoming I think the top grossing movie for United Artists that year, And one of the side effects was that suddenly television networks were extremely interested in Sherwood Schwartz is Yours and Mine pilot about blend and families again, And he'd say years later, this movie had dunbe my pilot for me. He decided to change the very similar title so that audiences wouldn't confuse it with the movie, and for a time it was The Bradley Brood, which I hate yeah, I know, especially because like David Cronenberg's The Brood would come out like twelve years later, The Brood. Yeah, I don't like The Brood. Then it morphed into The Brady Brood, which I also don't like, and finally The Brady Bunch. But the promise of the show was still too close to comfort for the producers of Yours, Mine and Ours the movie, who threatened legal action against Sherwood Schwartz and The Brady Buns production for seemingly jacking their script idea. Schwartz responded by turning over his script and outline for the series, which he'd written years before the movie came out, thus diffusing any threat of legal action, but the show was plagued by scoreless rumors that something you know untoward it occurred. How does that work? You were you were a screenwriter or a major How does that work? Did you have to log it with the WGA to have it count as a intellectual property or could you just produce something that you carbon dated or had notarized when you wrote it, And we're like, we're putting an envelope and mailed it to yourself, which was the poor man's notary it's a good idea to log stuff with the WGA, But yeah, I think they're a little bit looser. I mean, I don't know how it was in nineteen sixty eight, but yeah, I mean, if I were sure Richwartz and I had Gilligan's Island under my belt, I would have sued this movie for being like, wait a minute, Yeah, he made a movie with almost the exact same title of an unproduced pilot of mine that's been to all three TV networks. Maybe this got out, like, you know, Lucy's a big TV power player at the time too, So I don't know anyway, too early in the show about the Brady Bunch for legal action and squabbles. Maybe one of the reasons he didn't sue is that he really had his hands full getting the show off the ground for ABC. Surewood Swartz oversaw pretty much every aspect of the production personally, including plots for the episodes. Many of the stories from The Brady Bunch were drawn from his own family life, and I love this. Perhaps not coincidentally, his favorite episode of the series was one called Father of the Year, where Marcia enters a newspaper contest against Mike Brady's wishes in order to write an essay about how wonderful her stepdad is, and hilarity ensues. It's doubtful that Sherwood Swartz's own daughter would have done this at the time, because she was honestly kind of pissed by the whole Brady Bunch thing. Sherwood's daughter, Hope would later say that she found the Brady Bunch really embarrassing because she'd often watched the show and see stories from her own life popping up in the plot lines. Presumably, Sureward made it up to her by getting her not one, not two, not three, but four guest spots on the show, including a recurring role as Greg Brady's steady girlfriend Rachel and Hope. Schwartz would later go on to marry musician Lawrence Juber, who is the guitarist in Paul McCartney's Wings. In nineteen seventy nine, he played on their Back to the Egg album together along with her brother Lloyd more on him. Later, three of them wrote a Brady Bunch musical that premiered in October twenty twenty at the Augunquick Playhouse in Maine. I was trying to find something interesting to say about him, and on his Wikipedia page it just says he's he was miscredited as Lawrence Tuber on this which is potato a kind of potato a Tuber on the nineteen eighty one Ringo Star solo record Stop and Smell the Roses. Oh, poor Lawrence. Sorry, what were we talking about? As you were? But we can't talk about Brady Bunch music without discussing the famous theme song, which was written by Sherwood Schwartz himself shrewarch Worts. His productions were famous for the ingenious story songs that always outlined the plot of the show. He'd co written the Gilligans Island theme which, interestingly, their pilot had a completely unrelated clipso song on it, which is kind of a kind of a catchy too look it up on YouTube. But you know, the Gilligans Island theme song gives you all the information you need to know about the series right there. So if you're brand knew it's you can hop right in. It's great, probably one of the reasons that contributed to his success well. Shrwod Swartz also wrote the lyrics to the Brady Bunch theme with music by the composer Frank Daval and hilariously, he was always haunted by the line. They knew that it was much more than a hunch because it was basically just a placeholder, but he couldn't think of anything better, and Sherwood s Worts' son, Lloyd would torment him by sneaking up behind him and singing that line in his ear, which is funny to me, it is a pretty bad line. The theme song for the first season of The Brady Bunch was sung by the Peppermint Trolley Company, who were in La Area Sunshine pop band who were basically just like half a step away from being studio musicians, and in fact, some of the famous Wrecking Crew session musician players were the ones that are on that song. You know, they're the people who played with Phil Specter, the Beach Boys, Elvis. So you've got Carol Kay the bassist, and Carol Brady together at last. But during filming for the first season, Sherwood Schwartz supposedly heard Christopher Knight, who played Peter Brady, singing the Brady Bunch theme songer on the set and he thought this was really cute, and this gave him the idea supposedly to have all six Brady Kids sing the song themselves. But I think the timing of this is really suspicious because the second season premiered right when The Partridge Family premiered, which you know, obviously became a massive hit both on television and the radio airwaves. So I'm guessing Sherwood Schwartz wanted a piece of that big TV family music act action. That same year, in nineteen seventy, they released an album of the Brady Kids singing Christmas carols called Merry Christmas from the Brady Bunch, and hilariously, the following year, the Partridge Family at least their Yule Tide album a Partridge Family Christmas Card. I just love this notion of like an arms race between calcil knockoff Gargantean singing families on network TV in the early seventies. I think they were both on ABC, though, so maybe it was like a same team kind of thing. But still, Oh, how Blaine played on the Hartridge Family record. Oh yeah, they had a lot of wrecking crew people on those. Yeah. I think that the harpsichord those like Harpsichord triplets on the theme of the Partridge Family or come On, Get Happy or whatever. It's called was inspired by the Beach Boys song. It was just a single only called the Little Girl. I once knew do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do do. Yeah, I can always bring it back to Brian Wilson and the sandbox casting. When it came to assembling casting that segue Jesus Christ, I mean I didn't really give you much there, I mean, pretty bunch. The cast of the Brady Bunch was so much more than a hunch. Anybody golf swing. When it came time to assemble the crew of Brady children, much like Doctor Hammond in Jurassic Park, Sherwood Schwartz spared no expense. He auditioned, by some reports, four hundred and sixty four children over the course of three months. We do the math on that, five eight hour work days a week, how many children per hours? That? Yeah, the kid just comes in and opens their mouth. He's like, no, next, it's about one an hour. By the way, Oh, I guess that's reasonable. Okay, all right, fine. To find the six young leads, three boys and three girls, he had a funny process to determine which kids had the right stuff, and when he held auditions in his office, he put toys all over his desk as a distraction. He figured that the kids who wouldn't become fixated on the toys with ones with the stamina and focus required from making a sitcom. Is that like a jelly the Reagan's jelly beans rule? Oh is that true? I know we love jelly beans. And at a jar of the Mana's desk was that to like try to weed up if people had self control. I didn't know that he had a standing order of seven hundred and twenty bags of jellybellies per month. Man after my own heart, I was gonna say, that's up there with you. As Christopher Knight, who played Peter Brady, later said, it wasn't a talent audition, it was a looks audition. Schwartz was very clever about how he structured his TV family. He wanted the three age groups of kids on the show, children, tweens, and teens to appeal to a full range of young viewers, so that everyone, regardless of their age or gender, could find a character on the show that they could identify with. I think that's really clever. It's very clever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And this goes a long way to explaining why the show was a big hit with kids more so than adults, and to visually illustrate the idea of a blended family, he wanted the husband and wife to each have different colored hair, and their chorus bonding children's hair would match. This. Early in the casting though, they didn't know who the parents would be yet, so instead of having just six kids, Sherwood pulled twelve three blonde girls three brunette boys that wound up on the show, as well as reserves of three brunette girls and three blonde boys. Or palette swapped. It's like in the Mortal Kombat games, or like video game design where they like just would swap the colors of like in the first Mortal Kombat game, the Ninjas sub Zero and Scorpion. There's all this lore about how their mortal enemies or whatever, and when they were designing the game, they were just like, Ah, it's the same guy, just changes colors. I didn't know that. Yeah, palette swapping, it's like a thing with early video games. Yeah, I Surewood later said in his book Brady Brady Brady Colan, The Complete Story of the Brady Bunch as told by the Father Slash Son team who really know that should have gone back to the editor that that's a defensive book title. To this day, there were three dark haired girls and three blonde boys somewhere in the world who might have been the Brady Bunch kids, and they are just finding that out if they're reading this book. Actually, that's not true. The almost Jan, who is a woman with the awesome name of Debbie Storm, was given a bit part as Jan's classmate in the episode My Fair Opponent, Thank You. I just wanted to see if she has any other credits. I mean, she has many credits, but it's all Brady Bunch related stuff. Oh, she was in a movie called The Brotherhood of Satan. Well did you know it? We'll get to this later. The actual person who played a Jam Brady eve Plum, tried out for the part of Reagan and the Exorcist while she was on The Brady Bunch in nineteen seventy three. Okay, okay, okay, So there's a little yeah there. It is worth noting, however, that hair dye was in fact used to give Nature a helping hand with the casting. Mike Lookinland was Sherwood Schwartz's first choice for the role of youngest son Bobby, and he had naturally strawberry blonde hair. When brown haired Robert Reid was cast as the dad, the kid had to endure his hair being dyed a wide variety of colors so that it looked appropriately dark under the harsh studio lights. Susan Olsen, who played Cindy, had it even worse. She was blonde, but not blonde enough for the producers. Well, you would have thought a Jewish television show guy would have been more sensitive to the plight of blonde people. So this eight year old kid had to submit to regular bleaching early on in the series. By the time they started shooting season two, her hair had begun falling out in clumps, so she went to Sherwood Schwartz in tears, begging him to stop having this happen, and he ordered the crew to let her hair alone. Speaking of hair, fewers noticed that Mike Brady and his two oldest sons, Greg and Peter went from having straight hair to their iconic, big, bushy rod Flanders esque curls between the third and fourth season, prompting many to speculate that they were forced to get perms, which was then the the trend for her suit men of the seventies. If you will, this is ok, if you will, yeah, very good. This is reportedly not true. Florence Henderson says that the style shift was a result of the episode being filmed in Hawaii in nineteen seventy two, where the humidity supposedly cause Robert Reid the Brady Dad Mike's hair to curl, and this supposedly led them to abandon the hair straightening treatment and go oh naturelle but maybe just out yeah man man. Back to Cindy, poor bald Cindy, or rather the young actress who portrayed her, Susan Olsen. She actually had an impressive career up to this point, considering she was so young when the show premiered. She'd appeared in episodes of Ironside, Guns, Smoke, and the groundbreaking sitcom Julia, and she had a role in the Elvis movie The Trouble with Girls in nineteen sixty eight. Is that one of the better ones? No, I mean, none of them are. After after Blue Hawaii, they all kind of took another of Las Vegas is okay, I guess, but yeah, not one of the good ones. She was reportedly the only easy casting decision for the show because Sherwood Schwartz was so thoroughly charmed by her lisp. He recalls her saying, I was on an epithode of gun smoke. I was on a wharf and I got frightened by a snake. And that was the end of the audition she had the part. Rather than send her to a speech therapist, Sherwood allowed her to speak naturally on the show. Generous of him, Let's make let's make this temporary speech impediment the defining characteristic of the rest of your life, and even incorporated into an episode called a first Full of Reasons. What don't it's like a fistful of dollars? Yeah, but there's a lisp thing in there. First God, these people are where She was teased by the buddy Bully Hinton, who taunted her by chanting, baby talk, baby talk, it's a wonder you can walk. Olsen regularly worked with a speech therapist until the age of nineteen, and ultimately under went surgery to assist with this. Is that something that we both share? Weren't we I was treated for disfluent speech as a as a little kid. I'd a lisp yeah, yeah, look at us now acting suddenly seeking Susan. I have no problem with my esses anymore, thanks to the Central Pennsylvania Public school system. I'm I'm surprised I wasn't taken out back and shot. It was an episode in season two where Cindy tattles on everyone at her family, and this had tragic consequences in her social life. When she was shunned by the kids at her school, who assumed that she and Cindy were one and the same. I was teased mercilessly, she was quoted as saying in twenty nineteen, I know about bullying, but I had really good parents who gave me a lot of wisdom. I was being bullied because other kids were jealous. One time, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood and saw a group of kids playing on a big mound of dirt. I wanted to go play with them same, so I got up my nerve and rode my bike over to them and tried to play with them. They started throwing dirt at me, saying, Brady Bratt, go home. I thought, wait a minute, I'm on a TV show and I have so much fun. I don't blame them for being jealous. I'd rather be on that TV show than playing on a mound of dirt, so let them have their dirt. What a hilariously specific anecdote. Sometimes life is like that. Susan Olsen actually started an inadvertent feud with another TV star at the time. She wanted to give herself sausage curl pigtails. Are you really you're making this? That's what they call it, sausage curl pigtails, as I've seen them described to look like. Another cute blonde TV star at the time, a Nissa Jones who played the character Buffy on the show Family Affair, starting Sebastian Cabot and Brian Keith, the dad from the original Parent Trap movie. That's a real trifecta of your interests. No is it good? I mean, this is definitely a segment that's for my fellow millennial kids who spent way too much time watching TV land as a kid, M four of them. Yeah, it's a mid sixties sitcom. No, it's not one of the good ones. Well, the character of Cindy seemed modeled after the Buffy character, right down at the creepy doll she carried around. Buffy had a doll named Missus Beasley, and Cindy had Kitty Carryall. Another actress on The Family Affair, Kathy Garver, who played Buffy's older sister Sissy, was not pleased with this, and she told Fox News as much a few years back, saying, if you watch the show The Brady Bunch, you see Susan Olson dressed up like a Nissa Jones was on our show, wearing a mini dress and supporting the two blonde pigtails, carrying a doll around all the time, just like a Nissa did. And she Susan Olsen has gone on TV shows and has admitted that they were trying to copy the success of our show with that character. Anissa Jones is kind of like the original child Star with a tragic after story. She died in nineteen seventy six at the age of eighteen in Los Angeles, and the corner said it was one of the biggest drug overdoses he had ever seen. And for an LA Area coroner to say that in nineteen seventy six, that's saying something. There are traces of cocaine, PCP, queyludes and second all found in her bloodstream, as well as a small vial of blue liquid next to her, which was never identified. So yeah, if the show Family Affair is sort of permanently asterisked, one not permanently asterisk but I mean it's sort of it lives on given that history, that unfortunate history, I should say. Susan Olsen went on to become a hydroponic weed grower at the advice of her then husband when this was still technically illegal. She would say that this was one of the reasons that they got divorced, and she went on to host what many have described as a right leaning radio program on LA Talk Radio until she parted company with the network. She denies that she was fired due to alleged slash reported islamophobic and homophobic remarks that you can google that we would not be reading on this show. Where were we the seventies? Your favorite Cindy related Brady stories. There's a scene in the episode Cindy Brady Lady where she struggled to memorize her lines and as she left the kitchen set. At the end of the scene, she can be seen breaking character and sticking her tongue out. That's because she thought that they were still rehearsing and she was growing frustrated. They left the shot in what you call one of the many sloppy editing decisions made on the show. Yeah, have it out for the Brady Bunch editing team. I mean, I think this was because it was just pre DVRs and home video, so I guess, you know, it was assumed that no and whatever. Notice. Yeah, I guess that's fair. There are numerous instances of continuity, as in The Brady Bunch Jan wearing a green hairtie one scene, brown and another, Greg wearing beetle boots in one scene and sneakers in another. One of the biggest examples is in the season two episode The Winner, where Mike and Carol Brady take Bobby to a local TV station to compete in an ice cream eating competition. He didn't have a trophy, was the only Brady get without a trophy, so they took him the competition that he had a chance in hell of winning. It's good. They leave their house in a blue convertible and return home in a brown station wagon. He lost so badly that to give him the car, Yeah, that's egregious. And then there were times the show would recycle Marsha's outfit for other characters later a few episodes later. For example, the orange and white miniskirt outfit she wears in the episode where she meets Davy Jones shows up later on a character in the background. That's just due to the Brady family's largesse. They were just they were just handing out there. They're they're clothes to children in the neighborhood where it once and then burn it And then Carol was like, no, honey, I said burn it, and then she snuck it out back. And we're gonna talk about the Brady family patriarch, Mike Brady, But you need to take this next sectionist with your beloved Gene Hackman. Oh, come on you, how did you not talk about Susan Olsen's art? Yeah, take us there, my dude. Susan Olson in July of twenty twelve was one of a number of artists and celebrities invited to show their work at the Pas Gallery in Fulton, California called Art with an Agenda, an exhibit inspired by Kelly Thomas. Kelly Thomas was a homeless man of schizophrenia who died five days after being severely beaten by members of the Fullerton Police Department At thirty seven. Olsen's Peace was titled still Life and showed a half eaten doughnut in a puddle of blood besides a lit flashlight. All Right, onto the parents for the Brady family patriarch. The production ultimately got actor Robert Reid, who we will get to, but originally Sherwood Schwartz had his sights set on it Gene Hackman, Baby, Popeye, Fine Doyle oh Man, only if he did it in characters Popeye just dropping racial slurs and drunk running over shopping cards under the elevated track in Brooklyn oh Man. The studio overseeing the production, Paramount, killed the idea sadly. Even though Hackman had just had his big breakout role in the Oscar winning Bonnie and Clyde as Buck Barrow, he still wasn't a big enough name for the studio to consider him as a lead in their new sitcom. Sherwood later said Paramount wouldn't even okay Gene Hackman for an interview because he had a very low tv Q. Tv Q is a survey that executives used to determine the audiences familiarity with performances like a like a Q store. They weren't commenting on Gene Hackman's intelligence, which is very high. No, yeah, both emotional and intellectual, I'm told. But the year after The Brady Bunch debuted, Gene Hackman, with no TVQ started in a little picture called The French Connection and won the Academy Award for Best Actor and has been a major star ever since. So take that paramount well, folks. Gene Hackman hates many things, as we've talked about on this show, but he probably wouldn't have hated the role of Mike Brady as much as the man who did ultimately play him. The network wanted to go with Robert Reid because he had a lead role in a popular early sixties legal drama, The Defenders, which earned a whopping thirteen Emmys during its run, which is thirteen more than The Brady Bunch ever won. So not only did he have audience recognition from that show, but he also was under contract a paramount at the time to do a TV pilot version of the Neil Simon Broadway show Barefoot in the Park, which had recently been made into a movie with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, I cannot stress us enough. Robert Reid, the Brady Bunch Dad was a capital s serious actor. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was a member of the Actor's studio in New York City for thirty years, and he was a member of a Shakespeare company. So he can almost be forgiven for feeling that the role of Mike Brady was somewhat beneath him. I am really hard pressed to name an actor who, from the very start so fiercely hated the role that made him famous. He initially said that when the show was pitched to him, it was a semi serious adult drama about modern blending families, and then somewhere along the line this shifted. In an interview in nineteen eighty eight, Robert Reids quoted as saying, I wouldn't have given the shows a nicol's chance of succeeding. He would often go into Sherwood Schwartz's office and say, Sherwood, I gotta get out of this. I can't believe he talked me into this. In a nineteen eighty three interview, Robert Reid admitted that he often budded head with Schwartz, saying we fought over the scripts, always over the scripts. The producer D Shwarts had done Gilligan's Island, which was just gag lines. That would have been what the Brady Bunch was had I not protested and Shrewd Schwartz was so frustrated with Robert Reid that he repeatedly asclaimed over the years that had the show been renewed for a sixth season, it was canceled before that, he would have either killed off Mike Brady or replaced the actor playing him, Darren Stevens in Bewitched. That's what they did to the Darren Stevens character. Shrewd Shwarts later said of Reid, television in general was beneath him, and situation comedy was beneath television. In his opinion, he wound up on a show that he didn't want to do in the first place, and it became more and more difficult for him and Sherwood. Schwartz tried to placate Robert Reid by letting him direct a few episodes, which is an old producer's trick to keep stars happy, like they would do on mash for example. With all in all, the but Unfortunately, Robert Reid could not be placated so easily. He frequently set Sherwood Swartz handwritten memos questioning his character's motivation or the emotional authenticity of a scene, and he was also a stickler for facts. He once held up production by arguing about the implausibility of his characters slipping on an egg, and he only agreed to shoot the scene after he dropped the egg for real and accidentally slipped, which he said later, you know, the whole way down. As I was following, I thought, geez, I probably deserve this. He was a sliver of self awareness. Oh yeah. He once complained about the quality of fake ink that stayed to Alice the Housekeeper's uniform, prompting him to dash off a furious, multi page letter to the show's top brass, tearing apart the prop department and calling the ink scene quote so unfunny that even a laugh machine would bulk at it. But the most famous instance of Robert Reid aka Mike Brady's nitpicking occurred on the season four episode Jan the Only Child. And in this episode, Carol Brady and Alice the Housekeeper were having a contest see who could make the best strawberry dessert. The character of Mike was supposed to walk in and say, it smells like strawberry Heaven. Robert Reid refused to say this line because strawberries don't smell when they're being cooked, and he supposedly dragged out an encyclopedia to verify this angrily to Sherwood Schwartz, and he wouldn't act the scene until the line was changed too. I do believe I've died and gone to strawberry Heaven, which is still pretty terrible. Shrewrid Schwarts got so used to predicting this nitpicking that he started brushing up on legal technicalities to ward off any potential problems. For one episode, when Mike Brady installs a pay phone in the house for his kids to use, Robert Reid sure enough complained about this being totally implausible, and Shrewrid Schwartz told him that it was in fact legal to install payphone in a private residence in Santa Monica, which is where Sherwood Swartz told him the Brady's lived, and since he had never up to this point specified where the Brady's lived, Robert Reid had no choice but to storm off the set and drown his sorrows at a bar near the Para Mountain lot, which he did a lot. Apparently shooting in the afternoons with Robert Reid was a little tricky. The final straw for Robert Reid came while filming the final episode of Season five in nineteen seventy four, when Greg Brady buys a hair tonic from his younger brother Bobby and it turns his hair orange. Robert Reid supposedly objected because, among many other things, the product wasn't FDA approved. He wrote a lengthy, extremely eloquent memo to Sherwood Schwartz and his staff which is inexplicably available to read on the Steve Hoffman forums, which is usually a forum for music stuff, but it's on there. And in this memo he evokes Hamlet and Citizen Kane and it's actually a really fascinating document which I encouraged everybody's interested to go check out, in which Robert Reid outlines what he calls the quote fundamental difference between melodrama, drama, comedy, farce, slapstick satire, and fantasy. He draws on all of his actor training in this memo it's pretty impressive. I have to say I'd like to read some of it because I find it both interesting and also it's just so incongruous coming from the guy who played Mike Brady. He writes, these styles of comedy require not only a difference in terms of construction, but also in presentation and most explicitly, styles of acting. The dramatis personai are non interchangeable. For example, Hamlet, archetypical of the dramatic character, could not be written into Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and still retain his identity. Ophelia could not play a scene, but Titania Richard the Second could not be found in Twelfth Night. In other words, a character indigenous to one style of the theater cannot function in any other styles. The boundaries are rigid, and within the confines of one theatric piece, the style must remain constant. Why it has a long since proven theorem in the theater that an audience will adjust its suspension of belief to the degree that the of the presentation leads them. When a curtain rises on two French maids in a farce set discussing the peccadillos of their master. The audience is now set for an evening of theater in a certain style and are prepared to accept having excluded certain levels of reality. And that is the price difference in the styles of theater, both for the actor and the writer. The degree of reality inherent. Pure drama and comedy are closest to core realism. Slapstick and fantasy are far less removed. It was also part of that theorem that one cannot change styles. Midstream television falls under exactly the same principle. What the networks and their oversimplification called sitcoms are actually quite diverse styles, except when bastardized by careless writing or performing. For instance, Mash is comedy, The Paul Lynden Show is farce, the Beverly Hillbillies is slapstick, Batman is satire, and a drew of genius fantasy. Imagine Archie Bunkers suddenly landing on Gilligan's Island. The maximum implicit and all this is when the first act curtain rises on a comedy, the second act curtain has to rise on the same thing, with the actors playing commiserate styles. If it isn't already clear, not only does the audience accept a certain level of belief, but so must the actor in order to function at all. His consciousness opens like an iris to allow the proper amount of reality. And it was acting subtext, and all of the actors in the same piece must deal with the same level, or the audience will not know to whom to adjust, and will often empathize with the character with the most credibility total reality listening the most complete empathetic response. Example, we are in the operating room and mash when the usual pan shot across a mirror out of operating tables filled with surgical teams at work. The leads are sweating away at their work and at the same time engaged in banter with the head nurse. Suddenly the doors fly open and Batman appears. Sounds awesome. I'm gonna stop quoting now for a moment. This goes on for a while before he gets back to The Brady Bunch. He says, the most generic problem to date in The Brady Bunch has been this almost constant scripted transposition of styles. He writes a little more before criticizing certain specific previous episodes, including a silent movie style pie throwing sequence that offended him to his core in a previous episode. Without belaboring the inequities of the script, which are varied and numerous. The major point to all of this is once an actor has geared himself up to play a given style with its prescribed level belief, he cannot react to or accept within the same confines of the piece a different style. In other words, when the kid's hair turns red, it's Batman in the operating room, I can't play it. Thus, the memo ends, I cut out a tremendous amount. What a bitch. So I'm gonna call this the dude rule from The Big Lebowski, as in, you're not wrong, Robert Reid, You're just an asshole. That's my third rule that I made a bulletop of my head for this episode. Sherwood Swartz apparently didn't get this lengthy memo in time to make any of these changes to the script, so he simply cut Robert Reid from the scene and ultimately the entire episode. Robert Reid showed up on the set anyway, and things got weird and tense. Security reportedly offered to have him removed, like physically carried off the set, but Sherwood declined because he didn't want to do that to him in front of the kids, and as a result, Mike Brady was officially quote out of town for Greg's high school graduation, which was taking place in that same episode, and most importantly to the history of the series, it meant that Mike Brady did not appear in the final episode of The Brady Bunch, which was canceled before work on the sixth season could begin. So that's all weird. But to his credit, despite their differences, Sherwood Swartz praised Robert Reid's professionalism and commitment to his performance. He later said, whatever he chose to do, after arguing and fussing and so forth, he would do it well. And he also acknowledged the chemistry among the actors. It became very attached to each other. Even Bob Reid, who was a personal pain to me, loved the kids and they loved him. And yet to the kids on the set, Robert Reid became like a second father. And in fact, the main reason Robert Reid didn't quit The Brady Bunch to begin with was that he didn't abandoned them, and he really treated them as if they were his own kids. He once took the kids on a trip to England because he wanted to expose them to culture and Shakespeare, which I find adorable, and he also gave them Super eight cameras for Christmas to try to teach him about the process of filmmaking, and on one occasion, his by the book Pain in the Ass nitpicking actually saved the kids lives. These season five episode The Cincinnati Kids was filmed to the theme park in Cincinnati, and Robert Reid refused to allow the cast to shoot a scene on a roller coaster until the camera equipment that was secured to the front of one of the roller coaster cars had been tested for safety, and during the test, the camera came dislodged and rammed into the seats where they would have been sitting. Susan Olson, who Cindy, was so freaked out that she refused to ride the coaster at all and a double was used for the scene. And Susan Olson posted a message to Facebook a few years back praising Robert Reid, who died in nineteen ninety two, as a beloved father figure, explaining that the man who quote bottle fed puppies when he wasn't quarreling with the heads of networks shaped her heart as much as my biological parents did. And in the same note, Susan Olson speculated that Robert Reid struggled to accept his own homosexuality was a key factor in his unhappiness, and I don't think he ever came out in his lifetime, Like so many actors who began their career in the fifties and sixties, he believed that being openly gay would ruin his career. And Olson wrote that those surrounding read for much of his life quote shoved their own judgment down his throats, and sadly he bought into it. He thought he was wrong. Because homosexuality was so taboo, he could never make peace with himself. He never allowed himself to have a genuine love. He was forever tormented by his own disdain for the natural inclinations that he was worn with. Bob was a family man. Had he been allowed to form a relationship with another man, he would have been the best husband ever. And Florence Henderson, who played Carol Brady, echoed the sentiment in a two thousand interview with ABC News. Here he was the perfect father of this wonderful little family, a perfect husband, she said, but he was an unhappy person. I think had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration he had. I had a lot of compassion for him because I knew he was suffering. Many associated with the Brady Bunch production, including Florence Henderson and Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady, sadly agreed that back in nineteen sixty nine, having an openly gay man playing a straight sitcom father would have most certainly doomed the series and probably would have caused the demise of the show. Barry Williams acknowledged, and I think it would have hurt his career tremendously. Robert Reid's sexuality was an open secret around the set at the time, and Florence Henderson said that when they were shooting their very first romantic scenes together for the pilot, she could tell he was getting extremely unco comfortable, and she could even see his heart beating through his PJ shirt. When they were shooting scenes where they kissed and sure with Schwartz all went over his head. He was just demanding take after take and finally Florence told him to back off and took Robert Reid aside and they talked things out, and she said they spent a lot of time rehearsing these love scenes in private together so they could be more comfortable with each other and ultimately would look more natural when it came time to film them, which was done usually at the end of the day after the kids went home. But yeah, Robert Reid never discussed this homosexuality of the actors who played his kids, and they all said later that he probably would have been mortified to know that they knew. It was a secret that went unspoken between the cast until according to Susan Olsen Marine McCormick's wedding in nineteen eighty five, she played Marsha. Susan said, we were all sitting around talking and Bob hadn't shown up, and Marine said, I wish she felt comfortable enough to bring a female or mail date just to be here, and that's when one by one we were all, like, you knew he was gay too. I found out when I was nine from my mummy, but none of us ever talked about it because we didn't think it was a big deal. Robert Reid won critical acclaim and an Emmy nomination for his groundbreaking role as Pat Kattison, a transgender doctor, in a nineteen seventy five episode of Medical Center, and he also reprised his role as Mike Brady in every Brady related spinoff, which I think is kind of touching. Just shows how close he felt to the rest of the cast, including the short lived nineteen ninety dramaedy series The Bradys, which we'll talk more about later. These episodes featured serious, dramatic plot lines. For example, in the pilot episode, when Bobby Brady, who dropped out of grad school to pursue a career as a race car driver, has a horrific car accident that leaves him paralyzed. Oh yeah, we'll talk more about this later, but these episodes gay really serious. Mike Brady gets involved in politics, and Peter Brady begins dating the abusive daughter of his political rival, and Marsha spurtles with alcoholism as her deadbeat husband loses a series of jobs, resulting in the couple moving into the Brady family home to save money. Yeah, it gets dark, so I don't know. Maybe Robert Reid felt vindicated that he finally got his like serious Blendid family plot lines a couple of decades later, but unfortunately this triumph was all too brief because the show was canceled after six episodes because people didn't want to see The Bradies living sad lives. That's why we watched The Bradies. We wanted to escape our own sad lives and even sadder. Robert Reid died two years after The Bradies went off the air on May twelfth, nineteen ninety two, of colon cancer at the age of fifty nine. Way too young, and he was HIV positive at the time of his death, which led some outlets to an accurately report that he died of AIDS, which wasn't true, and weeks before his death, Robert Reid called Florence Henderson and asked her to inform the rest of his Brady Bunch family that he was terminally ill, and he remains a beloved figure to his TV family and his fans. He was rated the fourteenth greatest TV dad of all time in a two thousand and four list published by TV Guy, which I think he's lovely, although I kind of think he should have been higher, So yeah, Mike Brady has something of a tragic shadow hanging over him. That's a complicated Uh, that's a complicated legacy. I know, I know. I mean, great, great actor, great actor. You know his last televised roles and Jake and the Fat Man. Have I told you about Jake and the Fat Man? No? I? Okay. I was going to text you this story the other day, and I didn't because it was the weekend. I didn't want to bother you with more of my brain droppings. So there's Jake and the Fatman is a running joke in my family. My grandfather used to fall asleep in front of the TV, and his wife used to always yell at him for falling asleep in front of the TV. So to try to like circumvent this, he would just randomly yell out plot points whenever she was like in the other room doing dishes or something, and he would just to try to prove that he hadn't fallen asleep. Okay, okay. So my parents drove to surprise my grandma grandpa like eight hours to like a blizzard or something on Christmas. And they arrived there and they left themselves. They opened the door and let themselves in the house and they find my grandfather sleep in front of the TV. And he wakes with a start and he sees them and his first thought isn't oh my god, my son and his wife just drove from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania and see us on the holiday, but was, oh my god, they're gonna bust me for falling sleep in front of the TV. So he just points at the TV and he's watching Jake and the Fat Man, and he goes, they kidnapped the Fat Man because I guess the character of the Fat Man had been kidnapped, but out of context, they kidnapped the fat Man. Yeah, my dad just hearing that having driven through a blizzard for eight hours, and that being the greeting from his father, just complete non sequitor, just it is funny to him thirty five years later, and it's become a catchphrase in my family. They kidnapped the Fat Man. And I was going to text you that this weekend because he came up and I thought you'd find it funny. I can't believe you asked me that. Well, as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, Well, pivoting from that to Missus Brady, who's a lightness. Florence Henderson wasn't even the original first choice to play the Brady matriarch. Competition for the role was apparently very fierce. One actress seeking the role sent Sherwood Schwartz nude photos. Do we know who that was? I do not. I looked. Another woman grabbed Schwartz's crotch when he went to shake her hand. Neither of them got the part. When pre production first began, Sherwood Schwartz wanted to keep the mom character similar to Lucille Ball in the movie Yours, Mine and Ours, which mentioned earlier. To that end, they wanted Missus Brady to be a wacky comedian Alla Lucy. They originally cast a comedic actress named Joyce Bullefont, who was used in most of the screen tests for the child actors during auditions, and in fact one of the reasons that eve Plum landed the role of Jams because she looked a lot like Joyce Bullfunt, But dynamics changed when they cast Anne Bea Davis for the role of the housekeeper. Alice Davis was an Emmy winning comedian, so to balance things out, they decided to recast the other as someone more down to earth. This was bad news for Bullefont, who later told Fox News that she was signed, sealed, and delivered to play the role of Carol Brady. As she was trying on costumes. Three days before the pilot was to begin shooting, Sherwood Schwartz broke the news about the recast, and Bullefont was understandably devastated. I had signed a seven year contract, she recalled. The little girls were cast to look like me. She got over it. She went on to play a leading role in The Mary Tyler Moore Show Or with cousin Oliver I believe we will talk about later. Beforecasting Florence Henderson, producers tried to get her best friend Shirley Jones, but Shirley Jones passed on the role, as she put it, because she refused to play a part where all she had to do was quote, take a pot roast out of the oven. Of course, just a year after the Brady entrepremiere, Shirley Jones would then play Carol Brady's early seventies TV matriarch of an extra large sized family rival on The Partridge Family that was a hell of a dangling modifier, Thank you. And this show aired an hour after The Brady Bunch on Friday nights in ABC. He really did just a big old family rock block on ABC. Huh they loved the Causeles, Yeah, they're all pictures family based on the Causeles. Florence Henderson had impressive background in television. She'd been the first woman two guest hosts The Tonight Show in nineteen sixty two, between Jack Parr and Johnny Carson's tenure. That's really cool. Good for her? Was she a stand up? She was a sad She was like an all around entertainer. She I think she had a Broadway background and sang. When Henderson arrived late to do her screen test for The Brady Bunch, she couldn't find anyone to do her makeup, and she ultimately stumbled on a makeup room for Star Trek, which briefly shared studio space with a Brady Bunch. Henderson said she sat in a makeup chair between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, both of whom ignored her. I think she hated them for the rest of her life for that reason, feeling slighted by them. That's fair. The Brady Bunch Pilot was shot in September nineteen sixty eight. Why is the Brady Bunch Pilot never included in stock news montage of the Turbulin Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, The Brady Bunch premiere DNC riots in Chicago. They Bunch, it didn't premiere. It was right, it was. The pilot was shown one of the many things that was shot in nineteen sixty eighth O. The Brady Bunch Pilot shot in September of nineteen sixty eight, a full year before the show premiered on primetime, and during that time, Florence Henderson's cast in a movie musical called The Song of Norway, which was filming on location in Denmark, when she learned that the show going into production. As a result, the Brady Bunch began filming the first six episodes of the show without her while The Song of Norway wrapped in Europe. Weirdly, this movie also featured David Bowie's early girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale as a dancer. That's a fake name. You made that up, real name, he wrote. He wrote a song about it. Letter Hermione, She broke up with Bowie to take the role, and it left him heartbroken for the rest of his life. As you mentioned, the song Letter to Hermione appeared on the space out of the album and in the video for Where Are We Now in twenty thirteen, he can be seen wearing a T shirt that says the song of Norway. Okay man, well here we go. Wait a minute, you know David Bowie's real name is David Jones, Yes, and he changed it. One of the reasons is because he didn't want to be confused with David Jones of The Monkeys, who played a crucial role on The Brady Bunch, which we don't really get into much on this episode because we're too busy talking about go on coke, mostly political assassination's Adrina, chrome, police brutality. What else we touched on. But back to Florence Henderson. She was forced to wear a wig for the first season because her hair been cropped short for a Broadway production of South Pacific, which sadly featured none of David Bowie's exes. As revealed in the pilot, Carol Brady's maiden name was Tyler and her married name was Martin so there's been a great deal of speculation among fans as to what happened to Carol's husband. Mike Brady was a widower, but the show was always vague about what had ended Carol's previous marriage. Sureward Schwartz has said in several interviews that his intention was for Carol to have been a divorce, but divorce was still considered to be taboo for primetime television, especially for such a family friendly show. Towards the end of her life, Florence Henderson preferred to tell interviews that she'd murdered her first husband. She told the Huffington Post, I was the original black widow. Misty solved. Good for her. She's fun, she's awesome. She's on thirty Rock. Oh yeah yeah. By all accounts, Florence Henderson was a strong, powerful, inspiring lady who overcame poverty and neglect during the Great Depression when she was the youngest of ten children. She later said that she modeled her character of Carol Brady as the mother that she'd always wanted. She was active until the end, attending a taping of Dancing with the Stars to cheer on her TV daughter Mauren McCormick just three days before her death and Thanksgiving twenty sixteen. We stand a loyal sitcom mom. And she was a hoot. She was a funny lady. I'm trying to remember some of the thirty Rock, the thirty Rock bits with her. Anyway, she has a cameo and the weird Owl music video for Amish Paradise and the opening of the MTV Movie Awards, which she does the Sharon Stone leg cross from Basic Instinct. I distinctly remember that. Okay, you're staring very closely at a screen right now, which makes me wonder what you're looking at. Oh that was related to no No, the episode of the episode of thirty Rock. Um. Yeah, there's an episode where where Tracy is trying to uh, I don't know, they're they're, they're, they're the whole thing where Kenneth is confusing real life and sitcoms and uh, Basically, Tracy has bought Florence Henderson to come in and surprise Kenneth and her line. As she walks in, Kenneth goes missus Brady and she goes, I told the black guy here, none of that Brady stuff. And then she goes, let's get this over with. Whose booking is this? Are you the pervert who want to go to town on each other while I make a pie good for her? Uh? Sorry? In two thousand and two, she made memorable guest appearance on the improvisational comedy show Whose Line Is Anyway, participating in on screen kisses with Ryan Styles and Colin Mockery. In two thousand and three, she made a self deprecating turn a Pepsi twist, Pepsi twist. Wasn't that the lemon pepsi friend of the pot pepsi twist? Oh? That should have been your That should have been the rule. Pepsi twist, the pepsi twist rule long before I have sprite. Oh that's a hot take with Ozzy Osbourne. But there's one Florence Henderson's story that you cherry picked among decades of them. Less about the story and more about the fact that she chose to share it at the age of seventy eight. When she published her memoir, she had a one night stand with then New York Mayor John Lindsay and he gave her crabs. The then married actress revealed what's the name of her memboir? It's a non Brady title. Life is Not a Stage. As the actress revealed in her memoir Life Is Not a Stage. Henderson said that Mayor Lindsay seduced her over drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Then she woke up the next morning to find quote little black things crawling over her body. As she wrote in the memoir, guess I into the hard way that crabs do not discriminate, but crossover all socioeconomic strata. Mayor Lindsay must have had quite the active life. What a way to put the kibosh on a relationship. He apparently sent her flowers and an apology note to make up for it, but she got one hell of a story from it. Yes, well, from pubic Lights, We returned to the Brady Bunch. The show premiered on September twenty six, nineteen sixty nine, at eight pm, and one of the big knocks against it then and now was that, despite the whole blended family premise, the whole setup of the show seemed kind of dated. In fifties Ish and Florence Tennyson tried to get around this by lobbying the producers of the show to give Carol a job, but they insisted that she remained at home to reflect the experience of the average American woman at the time in the late sixties and early seventies. They ultimately compromised and gave her a bunch of volunteering permissions. You could work, but you can't get paid more than just this format. The actual look and style of the show made it basically an instant cultural relic, and hilariously, this was something that the producers of the show actively considered and tried to prevent. The kids in the show hated their wardrobe and begged the costume designers for anything more fashionable to wear, but Sherwood Schwartz refused because he wanted the show to run in syndication and he didn't want to do anything too trendy to make the show appeared dated. Nice work. They also kept writing in the word groovy into the scripts, which left many of the kids, specifically Eve Plum, who played Jan absolutely mortified. I just think it's so funny that they actually went out of their way to consider making it not look dated and somehow made it kind of one of the most dated TV shows. Yeah, I can consider, like well, die hard Brady Heads and I'm sure there are some out there. We'll remember that the Bradys had a pet dog in the first season who was known as Tiger. The animal disappeared abruptly from the show without explanation and became something of a mystery slash running joke among fans, and the reason for Tiger's disappearance will have Pet up in arms. One evening after filming the season one episode Kuchu, in which Jan appears to be allergic to the family dog, Tiger's trainer took the dog out for his daily exercise walk on the Paramount lot, and unfortunately, during this walk, Tiger was struck by a careless driver and killed. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was the cigar chomping executive who did it. The trainer flew into a panic and reportedly spent the rest of the night frantically driving to every animal shelter in town trying to find an identical dog because they still had more scenes to shoot for the episode, and amazingly, the Trader almost pulled this off. They did manage to find a dog that resembled the original Tiger, but the cast and crew got suspicious when they went back to filming these scenes, always discovered that the dog couldn't follow basic direction and was absolutely terrified by the noise and lights all. The only way the director got fake Tiger to stay in play during the emotional climactic scene where the boys were beating him Materiful Furwell was to nail his collar to the floor, and then the dog was written out of the show soon after, but the dog house remained in the backyard in mute tribute. I should say the backyard set. The only reason it was left there was at a hot stage light burnt a hole in the AstroTurf of the backyard set, so they put the dog house over to disguise it. We'll talk more about the house later, but the Brady Bunch house was pretty junkie for a guy who was supposedly an architect. That was Mike Brady's job, right, Oh, you don't know, Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is an architect. During one scene when the boys were playing football in the backyard, you can actually see the AstroTurf that's supposed to be the lawn coming loose, and there were also missing tiles on the brick entryway. You don't want to talk about the dead cat. Oh yeah, there was also the Brady Girl's cat Fluffy, which was featured in the pilot and never seen him again. If you were allowed to one know the whereabouts of the Brady Bunch's cat Fluffy, please tweet at us as someone does. Yeah. Well, The Brady Bunch is one of those shows where you watch it and it really seems like everyone involved, from the creation on down to the actors was stoned out of their minds, and in one scene in particular, you would be right. The scene involved Greg Brady aka Barry Williams, who was supposed to have a day off while filming the season four episode appropriately titled Law in Disorder in nineteen seventy three, and Barry decided to spend his day off by smoking pot with his friends because it was nineteen seventy three in Los Angeles. Then he had an emergency call from the Brady Bunch producers calling him into the studio immediately to reshoot a scene, and Barry showed up, but it was pretty soon obvious to all concerned that he was in no condition to work. He was supposed to just comment on a new boat that his dad had just bought, but his delivery was stilted, his eyes were glazed, and for some reason he inexplicably tripped over nothing in the backyard set, and ultimately the writer had to hastily rewrite the scene so that Barry had fewer lines it could just go home. He later wrote about the incident on his blog, saying, I went through a stage of experimentation as a kid. I certainly never went to the set high again. But I don't like weed. It makes me dumb, paranoid and hungry. But perhaps the most infamous incident concerning Greg Brady, and I would argue the most infamous incident concerning the series as a whole, was the time that Barry Williams asked his TV mom Florence Henderson out on a date. In his memoir Growing Up Brady, I was a teenage Greg, he admitted to having a crush on Florence, referring to her as quote a totally white hot babe. It's all in the emphasis and how you say that. Yeah, I know he was sixteen, she was thirty six. When those little things called hormones start kicking in, you get excited by even inanimate objects. He wrote, somewhat ungallantly, I have to say. In the chapter of his memoir memorably titled Dating Your Mom, it wasn't that I sought to bed her, he continued, I just wanted to spend time with her. That's the worst thing. That's the worst thing. Why did he phrase it like that. It wasn't that I sought to bed her, but I just wanted to spend time with her. It's the sought to bed. Who said, who says that a former seventies child star, I mean, well, yeah, that's true. Florence Henderson was married with four children of her own at the time, but she went out to dinner with Barry to the Coconut Grobe nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel where RFK was shot bringing it all back. They just saw what Florence described in her own memoir as a popular singer. I didn't give it all that much thought, though, since I would have gladly done the same for any of the other children if they had asked, she continued in her memoir. They were driven by Barry's older brother because Barry himself was too young to drive, and when it was all over, Florence gave him a peck on the cheek and that was it, and Florence Henderson later said the story was lightly exaggerated in Barry's memoir. She addressed the incident more directly on her website, writing that whole thing with Barry got blown way out of proportion. I guess in a sense it was a date. It was a date because Barry thought it was, but of course I had no idea that his intentions were to quote date me. It has made her a good story, though she added in her memoir, what is very true is that Barry did have a serious crush on me, which I understood and helped him get past told him about the crabs thing. Let us just say that if he had entertained the role in the hay with me, I would have never done that. Undeniably, we had a very special connection, and it goes without saying that I always felt like a surrogate mother to him and the rest of the kids. On a deeper level, I represented something to him that he admired. He loved music and knew I could sing. He also liked my work ethic and adopted it as he still does. He remained a dear friend. The proximity of Surrogate Mother and roll in the Hay, and that anecdote was a little too close to come for me. You know. Barry Williams had a six year live music review where he sings the songs of the seventies and can you guess where Tahoe? So close? Reno Branson, Missouri. Always I knew he lived in Branson. Yeah, there's a giant Titanic museum in Branson, as Branson like an epicenter of all my interests. Mid century kitchen Titanic apparently. Yeah. Wow, Just to wrap up the whole Barry Williams sleeping with the yeah Yeah. In twenty fourteen, during an appearance on The Talk celebrating Florence Henderson's eightieth birthday, Barry Williams surprised his TV mom with a passionate kiss before telling the crowd That's something I've been waiting forty years to do. But still, it's just weird that he made that like his like the defining anecdote for his life. Yeah, yes it is. Yeah, that's the quiet part, lad hig Thank you Haigle. That is the joke. Okay, okay, cool, cool, Thanks Ted, that was the joke. Thank you, Ted. That was the joke. Yeah. Oh, he's got a podcast where he goes episode with yeah, episode by episode if it's doing better than our shelf and kill myself. Well, what's it called the Brady Brothers or something real? The real Brady bros. Hell it is portion is the only part. The only thing that's important is that we're having fun and we're still to your friends. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So Bear Williams did not have a sexual encounter with his TV mom in the seventies nailed it, but he did have a sexual encounter with his TV sister, which is almost as good slash bad. He also talked about this in his memoir. There have been some sexual tension mounting I Travelish said mounting there between Barry Williams and Marine aka Marsha McCormick on the set, and it was fairly obvious to the crew. While filming a scene with a two sat on a bed for an episode called a Room at the Top, where they battled over who got the private room in the attic. The director kept having the reshoot because the body language between the two of them was just too flirty. And Sherwood Schwartz's son Lloyd, who worked on the show resorted to asking each actor to make a fist and place it between them as they sat on the bed, telling them to maintain that amount of distance at all times during the scene, which is basically the sitcom production equivalent of the teacher at the middle school dance, you know, going around telling all the slow dancing tweens to leave room for Jesus. They were apparently fairly serious, at least on an emotional level. Marine, I can't I can't bring myself to say this. I wanted to lose her virginity to Bury, which is a sweet she said in her memoir. There was apparently an instance when and Barry had Marine over to his parents' house for dinner, and then after dinner, he took her up to their bedroom where they listened to some Barry White, which sounds like a polite euphemism, but that's real. But they were unfortunately interrupted by his mother calling them down for dessert, which also sounds like a euphemism, but it is not. This has somehow become the filthiest episode we've ever done. Is anyone ever have they ever dressed his uh? The twin sests from Game of Thrones? That would be a funny bit. Oh wow, oh yeah, you know William Marine McCormick is uh Cercy and ERTs? What lertees Layerties? You think there's a character on Game of Thrones named Larerties? Do you think I've seen Game of Thrones? Given how much I know about the Brady bunch, do you actually think there's overlap in my brain for that? You get Layerties from Greek? Maybe, I don't know. It's probably a name I've only seen written and I'm like, I just assume that was how you pronounced this. Jamie Lanister, oh no from New England, Yeah, Lanister anyway. Marie McCormick and Barry Williams aka Marsha and Greg Brady finally kissed while filming a three part episode in Hawaii for the show's fourth season in nineteen seventy two. The pair reportedly snuck out after curfew and took a moonlight stroll on the beach where they kissed, and Barry described it in his memoir as quote, something I've been meaning to do for a long time, which I think is the same line he used on Florence Henderson m Unfortunately it was not quite as pleasant a memory from Marie McCormick, who ultimately was still weirded out by the whole TV brother thing. She wrote about the incident in her own memoir, Here's the Story, Surviving Marsha Brady and Finding My True Voice described the incident. It's always bad when you describe a romantic encounter with the word incident. Describing the incident like a pulpy romantic novel, we couldn't hold back any longer, she wrote, That's not how you read a romantic, pulpy novel, but I'm just going to go with it. It was our first kiss, and it was long, passionate and deep. Then it finally hit me, oh my god, I'm kissing my brother. What am I doing? Things understandably cooled after that from her end at least, and Sherbert Schwartz was understandably worried about his two teenage leads having relationship because this would almost certainly end in disaster. So he had his son Lloyd take Barry Williams aside and diffuse the whole thing, which he basically did by saying, why limit yourself use marine to get to her hot friends the seventies? How does her story get worse? Before it gets better. Yeah it does. Oh you didn't put her coke stuff in here, did you? Oh yeah, I'm reading it. Sorry you read it? Well, take us there, take us there? And oh yeah, Barry Williams fell off a surfboard and got hurt in Hawaii. Yeah it was bad anyway. Yeah, thay, thank us there. So the story wasn't nine. It's gonna be nice. It's gonna be longer than the Titanic Trilochie, Let's get to the Let's get to the Marsha Brady cocaine stuff. Okay, okay. Marie McCormick would go on to have several other high profile seventies pop culture relationships, including with Michael Jackson while he was still a member of the Jackson Five. She wrote in her memoir Once we went ice skating, and he held my hand as we glided around the rink. I wondered if he might try to kiss me, but he didn't. After another outing, after another outing, he did give me a kiss goodbye, but it was only a gentle peck on the cheek. Less cute was a date with Steve Martin a few years later, after the Brady Bunch had ended. Apparently Martin had asked for her number through their mutual friend, Chevy Chase. No idea how Maureen and Chevy knew each other, but guesses one, two, and three are cocaine. The date with Steve was in the midst of her growing substance abuse problems, and according to her account in her memoir, it did not go well. She wrote, I remember him being a very good kisser, but I was insecure and either high or spaced out, most likely both, and I didn't laugh at his jokes, though Steve was too polite and confident of his talent to say anything. I'm sure that's a weird thing to say. I'm sure it wasn't funny. Yeah, I'm sure my inability to carry on a normal conversation or respond intelligently put him off. We never spoke again after that date. I've always regretted my behavior because he impressed me as an extraordinary guy. I would have enjoyed a second date. Oh, I would look to say. During a time on The Brady Bunch. Marie McCormick also had a crush on her TV dad, Robert Reid, which wouldn't have worked for so many reasons. I would love a poll of child actors who had crushes on their TV or movie parents. And then I would like a psychologist to interpret the results of that poll because I feel like it's like disproportionately high. It's curtainly high. I don't know how I feel about high, but I know it's high. Who who just had a just confessed about having a crush on m Lena Bonham Carter, one of the Harry Potter kids. But I guess that's that teacher. What's that? It wasn't she a teacher? And then no, she was one of the death theaters. It's one of the bad guys. Yeah, it doesn't really, it doesn't really, you know. Oh yeah, having a crush on an older actor that's like just in the same thing as one thing, but like having a parent who is your parent? Yeah? Or a sibling no parent parents, sorry, parent parents. Jesus Maureena had guest roles on I Dream of Jeanie Honey West, the Farmer's Daughter, and My three Sons. Shockingly, none of those are porn uh. Prior to getting cast on Brady Bunch but to me, but to Jordan, her biggest role was the voice of the chatty Cathy Doll yeah, okay man the second version of It sixties with the non movable I ask your mom Oh, of course the rebooting one. Yeah, she'd also appear You're not a Chattycathy purist. McCormick also appeared in TV ad for the Doll before she was cast as the voice of it. Are you cast for the Voice of a Doll? Another child who was involved with that commercial was Eve Plum, who would play Jan Brady. So there's another weird doll connection. But the most infamous TV moment with Marie McCormick occurred in the season four episode called The Subject was Noses, which is, of course, yes, the legendary scene where she gets hit in the nose with a football. The professional that she was, she actually got hit in the face with her football. Christopher Knight Peter Brady was supposed to throw the ball in the show, but he had a hard time actually hitting her, so Sherwood Schwartz stepped in and gamely railed the teen actress directly in the face with a tight spiral phrasing. He reused the nose bit from mckilligan's Island episode. He has like a tarantino esque thing for swollen noses. Yeah. In the episode A Knows By any Other Name, Gilligan's nose swells up when he falls out of a tree. Did the guy who played Gilligan have a Cooke brom Bob Denver. I think he was a huge bodhead. I think he got like busted a few times. Oh that's fine. But unlike her annoyingly perfect, goody goody sitcom character, McCormick had a rebellious streak. Susan Olsen tells the story of Marine going shoplifting with Susan Cowsill of the Sills, the real life family band who inspired the Partridge Family, and then after the show ended, McCormick fell into the sadly now familiar X child star trap of drug binges at the Playboy Mansion and Sammy Davis Junior's house. Is that real? Yeah? I mean maybe that's not part of the ex child star cliche that Sammy Davis Junior's house is a little more specific, but yeah, no, it was real. Wow. No, I mean I knew the Playboy Mansion. I assumed the Playboy Mansion thing. I didn't realize that Sammy Davis Junior's house was a Dan of iniquity I should have assumed. Yeah. Yeah, As she wrote in her memoir Are Jesus Christ, they would call me the hoover because of how much cocaine I would do. If there was coke, I had to stay up and do every last flake, even if it meant going without sleep for days. Nothing else mattered. Her illness began to impact her career. She reportedly stayed a week for three days prior to auditioning for the role of Marion Ravenwood in Indiana Jones and Ready to the Lost Arc with Steven Spielberg, and it went so badly that Spielberg just gave her an orange and sent her home. I don't really understand what the orange was about. I think he thought that she had the flu, and she was like sniffling and looked pale. Yeah, it's like, oh, you need some vitamin take this from this edible arrangement that Harrison Ford just sent me. Maureene married fellow actor Michael Cummings in nineteen eighty five. Underwent a series of therapies for her addiction and depression, including treatment with the controversial therapist Eugene Landy, who treated and or abused Brian Wilson in the seventies and eighties. She has since regained her health and he's reportedly very happy. Well, Marsha and Greg weren't the only Brady kids to have a love connection. Cindi and Bobby, or Susan Olson and Mike looking Land also had a crush on each other on the set, and they used to sneak into their dead dog Tigers doghouse on the set to make out as nine year olds, which is somewhere between gothic and adorable. Jesus Christ, that's a little young, even for the seventies. Yeah, Susan Olsen admitted this is these quotes from her with admirable frankness, that all the kids hooked up at one point. She said, quote, I think all of us did. We led a sheltered life for part of the year, so if there was anybody to get a crush on or try to date, it would be our counterparts on the show in the age brackets. Yeah. But okay, Well, then as I got a little older, they because I started trading Bobby Star, Bobby started to get a crush on jan when everybody started getting a little older. Um, and he would later accuse Eve plum of stealing Bobby Mike looking land away from her. And they had had a fake marriage, Bobby and Cindy to to I almost consummate, they did not when I was trying to say to make their their child love. No, No, they had had a fake marriage just on the set, and when Bobby started to get a crush on jan they had it ann old or they they had a fake divorce, which they just assumed was just doing their wedding ceremony in reverse. So that was good. Yeah, But they all remained close, and Susan Olson named her firstborn son, Mike in his honor, which is sweet, whom I named after my TV brother who I used to kiss in our dead dog's house. Ah. Oh god, it gets weirder. Yeah. Bobby and Cindy, the youngest Brady siblings, also star in what I believe to be the only band scene in Brady Bunch history, and it's a pseudo nude scene a robe claude. Bobby and Cindy enter the kitchen to tell Alice, the housekeeper, that they're going swimming in a neighbor's pool a doctor, which to me adds a whole other creepy element to this. Alice, for reasons that I don't fully understand, opens Bobby's robe to see what swimming trunks he's wearing, which again weird, and discovers that quote as she says he's wearing his birthday suit and not his swim suit. Alice then checks Cindy and discovers the same thing, prompting her to quip who's moved in over there? Adam and Eve? And for whatever reason that I didn't watch this full episode, so I don't really understand, the kids are hell bent on going over to this pool naked, saying quote doctor Bellfield says, the sun has lots of vitamins, to which Alice replies, so does orange juice, but you don't go swimming in it. She eventually forbids them from going over, saying that she won't allow any of the Brady kids to quote some X rated party in their birthday suit. Weird. And another weird thing. I guess the older sisters on the show didn't like wearing bras, and so a producer would sneak up behind them and feel their backs to make sure they were quote properly dressed. This is according to Barry Williams memoir rude and weird. Being a girl coming of age on this show seems like hell, okay, yes, let's talk about Let's talk about our buddy Bobby. Mike Lukelyn as the man who played him, and he was up for two different sitcomerals in nineteen sixty eight, The Brady Bunch and also The Courtship of Eddie's Father, which is based on a popular early sixties movie, and his Paris decided that The Brady Bunch might be a better fit for him since he'd be around other kids. It was just one kid on the Courtship of Eddie's Father and he was the last of the nine regulars to be cast, and after accepting the role, he recalls being vote led into a room full of people and someone, most likely Sherwood Schwartz, said, Mike, this is your new family. Heavy. I didn't realize this. But he also went on to provide the voice of Oblio in the nineteen seventy one animated film The Point, based on the songs of Harry Nilson, which I love very much. I love that album. He also appeared in the nineteen seventy four blockbuster The Towering Inferno with Paul Newman, Steve McQueen O. J. Simpson making the connection between The Brady Bunch and Juan Degree, and also the nineteen seventies TV show The Secrets of Isis, which was not about what I thought it was about when I googled it. My favorite story about Mike Lukland's post Brady career is that when the network tried to get him back to appear in the mid seventies, Variety showed Disaster the Brady Bunch Hour more on that later, he asked for double the salary and hopes that he would be recast instead, they actually gave in, resulting in double the salaries for the entire gast, which probably made him very popular, but he was presumably not very happy about having to do the show. He's also a massive deadhead and reportedly saw The Grateful Dead in concert over one hundred times, and sadly, like several of his Brady compatriots, he struggled with substance abuse issues. In nineteen ninety seven, he received the DUI after rolling his car several times off the road, as blood alcohol level was three times over the legal limit in the state of Utah, where he was living at the time, and understandably, he cited this as a wake up call to stop drinking. He later said an interview with Oprah, the problem for me was I lived my childhood in my twenties. You should really try to live your childhood when you're a child, because if we do it when you're twenty six, it can be dangerous. And for a number of years he actually retired from the film industry altogether and made a living making concrete countertops, But in twenty twenty one he returned to the world of acting in the Lifetime Christmas movie Blending Christmas, alongside fellow bunch of stars Barry Williams who played Greg, Christopher Knight who played Peter, Susan Olsen who played Cindy, and Robbie Reist who played cousin Oliver who will get too later and another favorite story about Mike lukin Land is that in the two thousand made for TV movie Growing Up Brady, based on Barry Williams's memoir, Mike lucolun was played by his own son, Scott, which I think is cute. I tried to find a list of other famous people who were portrayed by their offspring in movies, and I stopped because this is twenty three pages long. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. And now we're going to talk about my favorite member of the Brady Bunch. Jan. I've always had a crush on Jan. In real life, I'm dating these sensitive middle child so maybe I always just had a type, just as the other corresponding siblings paired off, Eve Plumb and Christopher Knight had a brief romantic interlude, though I've seen two versions of it. One version is that they were making out on a prop car on a quiet corner of the Paramount backlot when a security guard came by and caught them, which left Eve Plumb mortified. And the more frequent version I've seen is that after the show was canceled in nineteen seventy four, she and Christopher Knight, who played Peter again the corresponding middle siblings, parked under the stars in his flatbed pickup truck with blankets, candles, and a six pack, only to be interrupted by cops because they were under age. Either way, in most versions, their moment was interrupted, tears resulted, and the magic was kind of over. And I don't think their relationship progressed for them. That. Arguably, the two most famous catchphrases linked with The Brady Bunch are associated with Jan first and foremost, and exasperated poudy, can you do it now? Marsha Marshall Marsha, Yeah, I remember it, but I mean not it happening? I remember this being like the thing about the show. Yeah, I forgot out, Sure Jan too? Well, Okay, well, starting with the Marsha Marsha Marsha. Surprisingly, given the enduring legacy of this phrase, it was only used once in the series, but it gained more popularity on Saturday Night Live when comedian Melanie Hutsall used the line and her impression of Jan for the show's Brady Bunch parody in the nineties. But as you said, the other line most commonly associated with The Brady Bunch to me at least is sure Jan, delivered with a withering side eye by Marsha. That might I guess we kind of Mandela affected it. That wasn't actually from the show at all, but from the Brady Bunch movies in the nineties, delivered by Christine Taylor as Marsha. Given the relationship between the characters on The Brady Bunch, it's perhaps not surprising that friction existed between Eve Plum and Marine McCormick in real life. Reportedly, it stretches back to their time on the show. This is interesting to me. Marine McCormick was originally tapped to play Jan but then Sherwood Schwartz adjusted the ages of the kids and made her the oldest, so maybe that got things off on a weird footing. An anonymous source told Radar Online in twenty ten, the problems between them go back decades. They've never liked each other, and there have been many events where Eva said I'm not doing it if Marine's doing it. Susan Olsen, their younger TV sister, echoed this in a twenty fifteen interview withnews dot com dot Au. They do not get along. She said, I think it's kind of petty from day one with these two have always been in the middle, and now it's at the point where there isn't even a desire to communicate through me. It's all really petty. But if you're feeling get hurt when you're really young, some people carry it with them or maybe to them. Moving on means moving away, But yeah, the origin of their feud remains murky. Some have speculated that it was something as simple as jealousy. Interestingly, given their reputations on the show, Marie McCormick, who's often portrayed as the glamorous older sister, has said an interviews that she always thought eve Plum was much more glamorous and pretty than her. So, yeah, it could have just been childhood jealousy at the time, But in recent years, there is reportedly another reason why eve Plum was pissed at Marie McCormick. For years, Marine insinuated in interviews that she and eve Plum had an affair on the set of the show, which it's just everybody, it's everybody. The earliest reference to this that I could find was a nineteen ninety seven interview that Marie McCormick gave to an LA area radio host saying that she developed a huge crush on eve during the time on the show, saying, quote, we had really good times together. Somehow this led DJ to unsuddenly ask whether they were quote Patty Cake close or Ellen Degenerous close. Oh that's okay, yeah, I know. Nineteen ninety seven, Marie McCormick reportedly replied, yeah, we kissed, and her rep clarified the next day that she meant kissed on the cheek. And then, prior to the release of Marines Memoir in two thousand and eight, a source in the National Inquirer claimed that she was going to admit to a full blown affair with eve in her book, which wasn't out yet at the time, And though the source of the rumor wasn't known, Marine apparently teased it in the press a lot more to drum up buzz for the book, and apparently she overdid it because the publisher, HarperCollins felt inclined to put out a statement verifying that there was no such story to be found in the book, but Marie McCormick apparently kept referencing it. Then, in two thousand and nine, a planned Brady Bunch fortieth anniversary union with Oprah Winfrey was canceled when eve Plum declined to attend, and it's pretty much accepted that this was because of the beef between her and Marine, and Marine wrote on fancast dot Com that quote, all of us said yes, except one person, eve Plum, who used to be my best friend, but now apparently once to distance herself from the show and most troubling from me. I have no idea why, unless she's mad at the joke I made a few years ago that we'd had a lesbian love affair. I made the crack to be funny and for shock value. I'm sorry if she took offense, and also she tried to laugh it off. During appearance on the Today's Show, she said I was having fun. It was something I was joking with, and she didn't take it that way. I've reached out to Eve. I've called her for years that I would never get a phone call back. Finally, after doing that for so long, I thought she'll call me once she wants to, and hopefully she will. After all this news of their feud and the press, Eve plumbs agent tried to downplay at all by saying, quote no one from Oprah Cole about any reunion. We haven't turned down anything. There is no feud. Susan Olsen aka Cindy called bs on this, telling Fox News in twenty sixteen that Eve was basically sick of Marine, implying that they'd had an affair. Whenever she had a project to push and wanted headlines. I don't like there to be a rift in the family, Susan said. I love them both, and this means whenever we get together for any project, there will only be one or the other of them. But I do understand Eve's point of view. She got tired of Marine gaining attention for herself by regurgitating the tiresome and false intinuations that they had a lesbian affair. However, even Marine aka Marsha and Jan reunited in twenty nineteen for the HGTV series A Very Brady Renovation, which we'll talk about a little later, during which they renovated the real life Brady Bunch House in Studio City to resemble the Brady. Interior was built on the Paramount sound stage, and during press for this show, one a trepid reporter asked Eve Plum if there had been a quote remedy to her alleged feud with Marine McCormick, and Eve responded with a laugh. People like to say things. There was no remedy needed, sure, Jan, and now for an Eve Plumb grab bag of random facts that I really can't fit anywhere else. Oh. We touched on this at the top of the episode. In nineteen seventy three, when she was still on The Brady Bunch, Eve Plumb audition for the part of Reagan in The Exorcist, later played by Linda Blair, which is I can't tell if it's just as weird or even weirder as Marie McCormick starring in Raiders of the Lost Arc. What are you thinking? What's weirder this one? Yeah? Yeah, seeing like Jan Brady's head spin from sixty degrees with por the crucifix thing. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I forgot about that. Yes, yes, yes, yeah, okay, good call, good call call cool cool cool, moving on, moving on, yeah, moving on. But yeah, Eve Plumb was clearly very ready for her stint on family television to be over. There's a possibly apocryphal story, but I really desperately want it to be true about her being asked to name her favorite episode of The Brady Bunch and her response the last one. Yeah. Eve Plum has a reputation of being the most over it and slightly bitter of all the Brady kids, and I think that reputation stems from the fact that she was the only one to decline to appear in the nineteen seventy six variety show spin off, The Brady Bunch Hour, which was a terrible idea and lasted just nine episodes. She was replaced by a woman named Jerry Rachel, who is forever more known as quote Fake Jan Brady Bunch circles. Fake Jan mentioned Fake Jane. You'll get a big response. I got a very big reaction. But all three of the Bradys sisters have bailed on one spinoff or another. Susan Olsen didn't appear in the nineteen eighty eight made for TV movie A Very Brady Christmas because shooting apparently took place during her honeymoon, which I kind of call bs on, but sure. Amaron McCormick declined to appear in the aforementioned short lived nineteen ninety dramedy series The Bradys. So every Brady's sister gets a pass. You get to skip one ill advised Brady spinoff series one apiece. But getting back to Jan, she was the most successful at shaking her goody two shoes Brady rep Just after graduating high school. In nineteen seventy six, she played a teen prostitute in Dawn Portrait of a Teenage runaway, and she apparently has quite the gift for real estate investing. In nineteen sixty nine, at the age of eleven, she purchased a Malibu beach bungalow for fifty five thousand dollars and she sold the house in twenty sixteen for three point nine million. That's pretty good. Yeah, I'm guessing that was purchased with her Brady Bunch bucks, but maybe not, because apparently they didn't earn that much on the show. Bar Williams said that the kids got paid a maximum of one one hundred and ten dollars a week during the show's run, and Susan Olsen said that they also had to pay for their own parking on the studio lot during the first season. That's raw, yeah, I know. And also the syndication contracts were garbage. So Brady Bunch Kids, we give you a C minus in the TMI School of Business. Well, onto the inanimate objects portion of the podcast. You will be sad to learn that the Brady Bunch House neither had a coke habit nor slept with its sibling or parent or parent, but the actual Brady House used for exterior shots there at the show is a charming little split level located in Studio City, California, gets great westward facing light. You know, we don't want to give out the address here, but you can find it. Supposedly. The fictitious address is four two two two Clinton Way. Show creator Sherwood Schwartz chose the home himself because he felt like it was the kind of stylish modern home that an architect, which is of course Mike Brady's, a fictional profession, would live in. He said, we didn't want it to be too affluent, We didn't want it to be too blue collar. There was only one problem. It was a split level, but the sets being built back at Paramount Studio Stage five were for a two story building. Ultimately, Hollywood set designers stuck a phony window onto the exterior of the real house to create the illusion that it was two stories, and, as is so often the case, the owners of the famous home found that the notoriety was somewhat annoying. A future owner built a fence around the yard to keep over zealous fans for peeking in at all hours of the day and night, and by the time production began on the two Brady Bunch movies in nine ninety five, the owners declined to give permission to shoot at the famous house, forcing producers to build a facade around another home with his similar yard. The interiors of the home on the Paramount lot were recycled for other shows, furniture and all once for the show Mission Impossible, twice on the detective series Mannix. It's so Weird you see Peter Graves a mission if Possible to strolling through the Brady's living room like it's totally normal. And Robert Reid had a recurrent guest role on Mannix. He played the part of Lieutenant Adam Tobias for twenty two episode Sadly we never got that Brady Bunch Mannix crossover series or Brady Bunch, Jake and the Fat Man. The home had some quirks to it, part for the course for a medium quality sitcom in the late sixties. The sliding glass door in the backyard, for example, had no glass in it to reduce any kind of reflective glare. In the episode where the kids break their mom's favorite base, there are a few quick shots that reveal the home has no ceiling, just studio lights. These are all airs that would seem less of a big deal before a freeze frame was such a thing. Perhaps most notably and famously, the Jack and Jill bathroom shared by the six Brady kids doesn't have a toilet, leading to the joke that the Brady kids were so wholesome they don't even go to the bathroom. This was not an oversight. Network standards of the time refused to allow a toilet bowl to be shown on TV before ten PM. Leave it to Beaver had gotten away with it for one episode nineteen fifty seven just by showing the tank portion and Eve Plumb later said at the time the idea was that it was just sort of tacky to be showing toilets on TV. Nowadays, everybody's on the toilet. Sure, jan when the Very Brady Renovation Show began, in which they renovated a real life house to look like the set of The Bradys, why I thought it was going to be to be used as well. First of all ratings, but I also assumed that they would turn it into a tourist trap or something. But apparently that has not happened yet. We'll talk more about that later. But I actually was looking into it because I would love to go toward the Brady's House. Of course you would anyway. In this show, the Brady Kids bathroom finally got a toilet, which you bet you never thought you'd say, I, nor would I. I've ever thought that I would say the phrase. And it was Marcia herself who christened it. I have to say I have used it now, she said, and it was good. Some I'm a god said yeah. Also at long last, Alice was given a bathroom in her maid's quarters onto another inanimate object in the show Cousin, Oh you you stopped watching this before? Was this aired sequentially? How would you have? What are you talking about? You never saw? Honestly, if I saw, if I started watching it and the Brady the older Brady boys had like curly hair, I tended to change the channel. I didn't like the later years on the Brady Bach because of the curly hair thing. Yeah, I just I don't know. It's like a later episodes of air alls shows are bad except breaking bad. Uh. Cousin Oliver has become something of a shorthand for character shoehorned into a TV show when it's on its last legs. In other words, Fresh Blood in a desperate attempt to boost ratings, sort of the human equivalent of the shark that Fonzie jumps over in Happy Days, giving rise to that phrase. How many different shows did they do this? On? Quite a few. They did it on The Partridge Family and later on Different Strokes When they cast Danny Cooksie, who is most familiar to me, as Bobby Budnick on Salute Your Shorts. I didn't know he had a life before Salute Your Shorts, or I knew he had a life. I knew he didn't. I knew he didn't wasn't grown on a Nickelodeon lab, But like I didn't know. All I could think of is Roy in The Simpsons. He laid a mister s yeah, hi BROI Leon from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Oh yeah, anyway, cousin Oliver was played by Robbie rist Was, and he was Carol Brady's nephew, came to live with the brady As while their parents were out of the country. On the surface, it made sense you introduced a new character to offset the fact that the cast were starting to age, but fans did not dig it. On Barry Williams blog The Greg Brady Project, I made me. I'm Barry Williams blog, The Greg Greg Brady Project. He responded to a fan question about how the cast received Robbie Rist into their midst. That was a hell of a tongue twister. Let's take that whole thing over again. I'm just adopting the like casey casum cadence. The longer this show came runs, Jordan's Son of a Bitch, Robbie came into a tough situation. The writers were floundering, and he introduced a very different type of humor into our show. Also, we had been together a long time and we really didn't have time to adjust to a new quote family member. His quote, it's not mine. I haven't had much contact with him, but I'm sure he is a nice guy, and I certainly wish him every success. I'm sure he's a nice guy. He was, after all, on the show for just six episodes before ABC killed it before sixth season, leading many to conclude that cousin Oliver was responsible for the death of the Brady Bunch. And then, in the second such instance of this pipeline, Robbie Risk joined The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In that show sixth season as Ted and Georgett's adopted son, David, and the show lasted just one season after that, leading some to accuse him of killing that show too. Thankfully, he has a good sense of humor about it. Years later, Risk appeared to members of the Brady Bunch cast on a special Brady Reunion charity episode of the game show The Weakest Link. Introducing himself, he joked, I hope I don't kill this show too. He ended up being the weakest Link of the episode and was eliminated by the other contestants. I guess they just didn't want a chance. And this brings us to a section of the show that I'll have to call a very Brady cancelation. It's important to note that The Brady Bunch was never really a massive hit during its initial run between September nineteen sixty nine and March nineteen seventy four. In fact, it never even cracked the top thirty in the Nielsen ratings, though it was popular enough that Hadnty Kissinger paid a visit to the set. Photos were taken and I love that. Please look it up. Yeah. And then of course they had guest stars like Joe Namath and Davy Jones. The latter of whom accompanied Marie McCormick tour prom which I love. According to An B. Davis, who played Alice and who later after The Brady Bunch went off the air, sold her home in la and joined the religious Commune in Colorado. The Brady Munch ratings were so low throughout its run that it was renewed for just thirteen episodes or half a season at a time, until the very last season. They couldn't get the network to commit to a full season until several years into its run. I love that kids love The Brady Bunch because it was generally told from a child's point of view, but adults never really connected with it, which is part of the reason why it didn't really thrive in prime time. And then when NBC put the edgy contemporary Sanford and Son opposite it, it just blew the Brady Bunch right out of the water and its ratings tanked. We discussed earlier how Sherwood Schwartz toured with the idea of killing off Mike Brady and and Carol go back to dating for a proposed sixth season. It's unclear how serious this was given just how much he hated working with Robert Reid. There's another story. He was going to recast Mike Brady and have Carol become pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. But in any event, the show was not renewed for a sixth season, and the final episode aired on March eighth, nineteen seventy four, very unceremoniously. The show was a hit, though in syndication. Much like Star Trek. The reruns that started running in September nineteen seventy five were scheduled a late afternoon, just after kids got home from school, which made it hugely popular with young viewers and their families. In my nineteen seventy six reruns up, the Brady Bunch actually beat out the vice presidential debate in ratings, and at the time of its thirtieth anniversary in nineteen ninety nine, each of the one hundred and seventeen episodes was estimated to have aired more than one hundred thousand times around the world, and presumably that number has grown exponentially by the time of its fiftieth anniversary in twenty nineteen. Now we got to get to the very Brady spinoffs. There are just so many media properties that they parlayed this show into It's insane. Actually. First, before we get to the spinoffs, we have to talk about the very Brady music career, if you can call it that. In the early seventies, the Brady Bunch Kids released four LPs plus a Christopher Knight Marine McCormick Duets LP, which sounds like hell because Christopher McCormick. Because Christopher Knight was, by his own admission, the only member of the cast who truly could not sing. Each of the Brady Kids, except for Cindy, released solo singles, and they did versions of American Pie, the Bad Finger song, day After Day, Love Me Do Baby, I'm Ana Want You by Bread, Saturday in the Park by Chicago Summer Breeze by Seals and Crofts, and the Michael Jackson song Ben, the one about the rats, They one about the rat yep. I guess rads singular That was Wilbur was the one who had many rats, right, No, Wilbur from Charlotte's Webb No, No, the twin dueling rat movies of the seventies. I don't know Wilber. What's Wilber? Oh, Wilbur's a Willard? Sorry, Willard had many rats. Ben just had the one, okay, yeah right, yeah, do you have like anemonic for that, like I before you accept after see, Ben is just one, Willard is many more fun Yours is better. But yeah, if you want to ruin any of those classic songs for yourself, have had it, Brady Bunch those versions of them. But getting back to the televisual Realm, there was an animated series. Oh no, the men had an army of rodents, so technically they both have many many rats in the Okay, I'm sorry, yeah, can we fix you'll punch that in plus that the post. Yeah, you're so if you want to ruin it anything, they sorry, I just this is what boggles the mind. The poster for Ben actually sets well, yeah, it sure does, but it says where Willard ended Ben begins? Are they related? Oh it's a sequel. Just now learning this, Oh my god, I'm glad we got this down. Yeah wow, they made They put the on the Jackson's live album. God, Michael really loved that song. It's on the Jackson Live album. It's on his number ones. Well it was a number one hit, but yeah, that's a Michael Jackson's ones. It hit number one on the Globe is nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars. I really genuinely didn't know that Ben was a sequel to Willard. I thought they were. It makes more sense that their franchise. Yeah, because oh, here's mnemonic for you. Ben is the name of the rat. Willard's the name of the guy. Okay, doesn't rhyme, but okay, now now I'll come back to it. I'll come back to it. Okay. Yeah, So if you want to know, it was produced by Bing Crosby's production company. Wait, really yeah, Bing Crosby Productions responsible for Ben for the Rat movies. Well, I don't know about Willard. You imagine him taking an ad out in trade papers like Ben By being No, that was the signature scent Ben by Bing. Oh god, okay, I'm sorry. He's died on the golf course, right. He was like, yeah, I gotta I got eighteen holes and like seventy six strokes. I think that's a personal best. Why do you think we take this over to the cabana and then he just like keeled over in the eighteenth green. Did not know that? I think? So? Yeah, it would have been better if a rat was involved. Who's to say. I think he's the one that like was like really bad to his kids, like mommy yauper, like yeah, whom, Yeah, that was the family guy joke. Right, you can beat your kids with a sack of sweet Valencia oranges and it won't be a bruise. This is a lot of friends you have. You Uh, you really nailed that. Crosby, who had a thirteen handicap, one with his partner by one stroke. At about six thirty pm, Crosby and his party headed back to the clubhouse. Crosby said, that was a great game of golf. Fellas, let's go have a Coca cola. These These were his last words. He collapsed and died twenty yards from the clubhouse entrance from a massive heart attack. I know my mid century Jesus Christ sor right, let's take this home. How many pages? Oh? Thank god? Almost done? Yeah? The rat the rat one was really bad, really bad. Uh maybe this show's furthest reach o ka, I'm keeping it. Just leave. It's it's like the you know the like oops, all berries or whatever. It's too much information, all tents, all rats. Back to the Brady Bunch televisual spinoffs. First off, we have the animated series The Brady Kids, which ran for two seasons between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy three, and this was the era when every primetime show had a Saturday morning cartoons series. The Partridge Family had possibly my favorite Partridge Family two thousand, two hundred a d which is like a Partridge Family jets In combo. In fact, I think it was actually slated to be some kind of a Jetson's project and the midway through they just switched to mid stream. There was also a Happy Days animated series called The Fawns and the Happy Days Gang. Yeah, all in all weird time for Saturday morning TV shows. But also in the mid seventies, not only was it a golden era for weird Saturday morning kids animated series, but it was also a golden era for variety TV programming. Which leads to nineteen seventy six is The Brady Bunch Hour, which is widely viewed as one of the worst programs in the history of the medium. The show is the branchild of Michael Eisner, a future Disney chief. Michael Eisner and Kick the idea to sit at Marty Croft, who were the Puppetier brothers who created these insane acidity children's programs like Land of the Lost and H and R Puff and Stuff, and the show The Brady Bunch Hour was meant to follow in the foot sets of shows like Sonny and Cher's Comedy Hour or Donnie and Marie, which was just a combination of skits, disco music numbers featuring the Bradys and guest stars like Vincent Price and Rip Taylor did not work out. There's even a book about the creation this misbegotten show called Love to Love You Bradies, which presumably takes his title from a Donna Summers song that they butchered. The bizarre story of the Brady Bunch Variety Hour, And so yeah, just the less said about it, the better. But I will say Robert Reid aka Mike Brady, the man who hated the entire Brady experience up to this point, had a wonderful time doing this show. He fancied himself a song and dance man, and if you watch clips from it, he's not very good at either, but he commits so much and there's just so much raw joy coming from this man. It's really really great. I love it so much. Ah. Then after this missbegotten Brady Bunch variety show in nineteen eighty one, there was a made for TV movie The Brady Girls Get Married, in which Marcia and jan have a joint wedding, which was notable as the final time that all nine members of the original Brady Bunch cast were on a We're in an on screen project together, and this was a backdoor pilot for a short lived Brady Bride sitcom that lasted just seven episodes. The two couples couldn't afford a house, which is very prescient, I must say, in twenty twenty three, and they decided to move in together. Marcia and her husband are more laid back and Jane and her husband are more uptight. I think that the odd couple meets the Brady Bunch, which is a better elevator pitch than it probably had. Sadly it did not work out. And then there was a nineteen eighty eight made for TV movie called A Very Brady Christmas minus Susan Olsen who's on her honeymoon, and that's where we start moving into the Brady drama d phase. I think this tape of TV movie was inspired by the show thirty something which grappled with baby boomers growing up in the eighties, and they were trying to go a similar route With the Brady bunch. Jan is separating from her husband, Bobby is dropping out of his graduate program to become a race car driver, and that ultimately leads to his car accident where he is paralyzed. Alice's relationship with Sam the Butcher is on the skids after he leaves her for another woman. All in all, just very sad Brady family. I like to quote the climax of a very Brady Christmas directly from the Wikipedia page because I can't say it any better myself. The family's Christmas dinner is disrupted when Mike Brady learns that a ruthless businessman that he designed a building for remember he's an architect, has cut corners, resulting in the building collapsing and trapping to security guards inside. Mike manages to free the trapped employees, but an aftershock results in Mike getting trapped in the rubble himself. In the end, Mike gets out of the debris after Carol and the entire family sings, ohcome all ye faithful to save him, to summon him I don't know. I mean, this is like the nuclear option of jumping the shark, collapsing building, summoning the body from the rubble with a Christmas song. It's everything, It's just everything. But yeah, this was the backdoor pilot for the Brady series that aired in nineteen ninety which we talked about earlier. Bobby becomes paralyzed, Marsha Brady played by another actress who wasn't Marie McCormick, struggles with alcoholism, giant bumber, realizing that America I didn't care to see the serious side of the Bradys. We got the satirical movie reboot in nineteen ninety five, with the sequel year later, the lesser known Brady Bunch in the White House made for TV movie that aired in two thousand and two, which I'd never heard of. I can't imagine that it did well post nine to eleven. It probably went the way of That's My Bush and just kind of got like buried because no one really wanted political humor in that era. And my favorite part about all these Brady movies was that the producers went to Florence Henderson to make a cameo and they offered her five grands, which was like the SNL skit of Lord Michael's offering the Beatles three thousand dollars to reunite on his show. She reportedly laughed in their faces, but then fans were clamoring free original og. Missus Brady cameo in these movies, so I guess the producers ponied up enough money and she made the cameo. In the early twenty tens, Vince Vaughan, of all people, was working with Sherwood Schwartz to reboot the Brady Bunch series, but Schwartz died in twenty eleven and this idea never came to fruition him and to date, the last true Brady reunion was twenty nineteens a Very Brady Renovation on HGTV, which we touched on earlier. The project began when the home used for the exteriors of the Brady House was put on the market in August twenty eighteen for the first time since nineteen seventy three. The asking price one point eight eight million, which given its history and the Airbnb potential, kind of seems like a bargain. A bidding war ensued with Lance Bass of in Sync among the interested buyers. We really should have asked them to do a guest segment on this show. I'm really pissed, damn it, because he's doing that. He's doing a couple of iHeart shows actually. But Lance said that he was quote heartbroken after he was outbid by HGTV, who picked up the property for almost twice the asking price three point five million. Can't be a corporation, my dude. I mean, he's had enough of his dreams come true. He went up to space and the Russians, didn't he go into the Russian space station or something? Yeah, I mean in outal So. Yeah, the Brady's, in conjunction with the HGTV people, did a gut renovation of this house to transform it into an almost identical replica of the interiors filmed on the Paramount sound stage in the late sixties and early seventies, complete with vintage furniture, wood paneling, rotary phones, the whole bit and the show, which sort of featured active help from the Brady kids. They probably just gave him like a hammer to swing or something. Premiered on September ninth, twenty nineteen, which was almost exactly fifty years after The Brady Bunch premiered, and I'd like to quote from a piece by Lindsay Parker that she wrote for Yahoo Entertainment. From the leaky clay pot that was once shattered by the Brady boys arrant basketball to the kitty carryall doll reclining on Cydey's bed, From the beaded hippie curtains and Greg's attic bachelor pad, to the vintage all of green appliances in the kitchen where Alice used to make her pork chops and apple sauce and pineapple upside down cake. From the long missing family pet tigers, Paisley curtains, wooden doghouse to the icon shag carpeted staircase. HGTV has spared absolutely no detail, spared no expense. Stepping through those blue doors and into the cobblestone walled entryway is like stepping into a groovy portal to nineteen sixty nine. However, there is one addition to the Brady Home that isn't true to the original. There's, finally, at long last, an actual running toilet in the Brady kids shared Jack and Jill bathroom. And you know what, folks, if that's not a fitting ending to this episode. I don't know what is That show set an HGTV record over twenty eight million total viewers. Oh, I'm sure what. People love the Brady Bunch. And you know what, getting a toilet in that house fifty year plot hole in a way that sums up the Brady Bunch. It's a kindler, gentler, warmer version of the past, one that never really existed. Nothing about the Brady Bunch represented a child's experience in the early seventies or ever. But it's the past the way we want to remember it, through rose colored glasses and with a toilet, And you know that's part of the Brady Bunch is enduring power. Watching The Brady Bunch as an adult, it reminds me of this line from Nick Hornby's book High Fidelity, in which his music snob main character wax as poetic about listening to something as horrifically mainstream as the Beatles. The Beatles, he says, belonged to him, having made its mark on him back when his life was small and contained enough for that to be possible. He says, the Beatles make me feel something. They won't make me feel anything bad. And I think that's what the Brady Bunch is for so many people, and I think that there's tremendous value in that. So for all the bad hair, implausible plot lines, and characters behaving in ways that bear absolutely no resemblance to reality whatsoever, I say God bless the Brady Bunch. Did I hit you with the heart? Did? That's a great kicker. I got nothing to add to that. Oh, well done? Yeah, man, folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. Oops, all digressions. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Runtog. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum. I'm a Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two,