The Brady Bunch

The regular cast appears in an opening title sequence in which video "headshots" are arranged in a three-by-three grid, with cast members appearing to look around at one another. The sequence used the then-new "multi-dynamic image technique" created by Canadian filmmaker Christopher Chapman; as a result of the popular attention it garnered in this sequence, it was referred to in the press as "the Brady Bunch effect".[7][8] In a 2010 issue of TV Guide, the show's opening title sequence ranked number eight on a list of TV's top-10 credits sequences, as selected by readers.[9]

Cast of The Brady Bunch in the signature three-by-three grid featured in the show open. Click on a character for the actor's biography.

• Robert Reed as Mike Brady
• Florence Henderson as Carol Brady
• Ann B. Davis as Alice Nelson
• Maureen McCormick as Marcia Brady
• Eve Plumb as Jan Brady
• Susan Olsen as Cindy Brady
• Barry Williams as Greg Brady
• Christopher Knight as Peter Brady
• Mike Lookinland as Bobby Brady

• Sam Franklin (Allan Melvin) is Alice's boyfriend. He is the owner of a local butcher shop. Sam appears in only eight episodes, but they span all five seasons. He is also frequently mentioned in dialogue, and Alice occasionally goes on dates with him off-screen. By the time of the 1981 made-for-TV film The Brady Girls Get Married, Alice and Sam are married.
• Tiger the dog – the original dog that played Tiger died early in the first season.[10] A replacement dog proved problematic, so the producers decided the dog would appear only when essential to the plot. Tiger appeared in about half the episodes in the first season and about half a dozen episodes in the second season. Tiger seemingly vanished without an explanation and was not shown again after "The Impractical Joker" (last episode shown with Tiger) and "What Goes Up" (last episode made with Tiger); however, his doghouse remained in the back yard for the entire run of the series.
• Mr. Phillips (Jack Collins) is Mike's boss at the architectural firm. He appears in only three episodes - all in season two - but is often mentioned in other episodes when work-related issues occur.
• Cousin Oliver (Robbie Rist) – in the middle of season five, producers added a new character named Oliver, Carol Brady's young nephew, who is sent to live with the Bradys while his parents are living in South America. The character was added in an attempt to fill the age gap left by the maturing Brady children—the youngest (Susan Olsen) was 12 years old during the show's final season. Lloyd Schwartz, son of creator and executive producer Sherwood Schwartz, later admitted that the character threw off the balance of the show. Fans disliked the character of Oliver, regarding him as an interloper. Oliver appears in the final six episodes of season five, which proved to be the final season, as ABC cancelled the series in 1974. The addition of the character has been cited as the moment the series "jumped the shark".[11] The term "Cousin Oliver" has been used to describe the addition of a young character as an attempt to save a series from cancellation.[12]

• Herbert Anderson as a doctor who comes to treat the boys' measles in "Is There a Doctor in the House?" (season one).
• Melissa Sue Anderson played Millicent, a girl who gives Bobby his first kiss ("Never Too Young", season five).
• Desi Arnaz Jr. meets Marcia, who wrote about him in her diary in "The Possible Dream" (season one).
• Jim Backus appears three times in the series, twice in two of the three Grand Canyon episodes, "Ghost Town U.S.A." and "Grand Canyon or Bust", playing Zaccariah T. Brown, who mistakenly thinks the Bradys are jumping his gold claim and locks them in a ghost-town jail; and in "The Hustler" (season five) playing Mike's second boss, Mr. Harry Matthews.
• Ken Berry played Ken Kelly, the Bradys' new neighbor who is the adoptive father of three diverse boys (black, white, and Asian) in the season five episode "Kelly's Kids". Sherwood Schwartz was attempting to sell a spin-off series called Kelly's Kids featuring Berry, but the show idea failed to interest ABC.
• Imogene Coca plays the Brady girls' great-aunt Jenny, whom Jan fears she will grow up to resemble after seeing a childhood photo of her in "Jan's Aunt Jenny" (season three).
• Don Drysdale tries to inject reality into Greg's dreams of being a professional baseball player in "The Dropout" (season two).
• Don Ho meets Cindy and Bobby and serenades Cindy in Honolulu in "Hawaii Bound" (part one of a three-part season-four episode), filmed on location in Hawaii.
• Davy Jones (of The Monkees) performs at a music studio and then takes Marcia to her school dance in "Getting Davy Jones" (season three). Decades later, Jones satirized his cameo in The Brady Bunch Movie.
• Deacon Jones encourages Peter's singing in "The Drummer Boy" (season two).
• Bart La Rue plays a football coach in "The Drummer Boy" (season two) and "Click" (season three).
• E. G. Marshall is J.P. Randolph, Marcia's school principal, in "The Slumber Caper" (season two).
• Brigadier General James McDivitt (NASA astronaut) signs autographs for Peter and Bobby after appearing on a talk show in "Out of This World" (season five).
• Joe Namath visits Bobby after Cindy contacts him saying Bobby has a terminal illness in "Mail Order Hero" (season five).
• Denise Nickerson as Pamela Phillips, niece of Mike Brady's boss, Ed Phillips, whom Peter dates at Mike's request in "Two Petes in a Pod" (season five).
• Wes Parker meets Mike and Greg in Greg's math classroom, thus curing Greg of the crush he had on his teacher Miss Linda O'Hara (played by Gigi Perreau), Parker's fiancée in "The Undergraduate" (season one).
• Vincent Price appears twice in the series in two of the three Hawaii episodes, "Pass the Tabu", and "The Tiki Caves" from season four, playing the villainous Professor Hubert Whitehead, who holds the Brady boys hostage.
• Marion Ross appears as a doctor who comes to treat the girls' measles in "Is There a Doctor in the House?" (season one).
• Natalie Schafer is Mike's fussy client, Penelope Fletcher, who is charmed by Cindy's impromptu 'Shirley Temple' routine in "The Snooperstar" (season five).
• Hal Smith appears as Santa Claus in "The Voice of Christmas" (season one), and as Kartoon King in "The Winner" (season two).
• Marcia Wallace plays a salesclerk in "Would the Real Jan Brady Please Stand Up" (season two) and Mrs. Robbins in "Getting Davy Jones" (season three).
• Rita Wilson began her career with a guest appearance in "Greg's Triangle" (season four) where she plays one of the candidates running against Marcia for head cheerleader.
• Paul Winchell appears as Skip Farnum, the TV commercial director in "And Now a Word From Our Sponsor" (season three).

In 1966, following the success of his TV series Gilligan's Island, Sherwood Schwartz conceived the idea for The Brady Bunch after reading in the Los Angeles Times that "30% of marriages [in the United States] have a child or children from a previous marriage". He set to work on a pilot script for a series tentatively titled Mine and Yours.[13] Schwartz then developed the script to include three children for each parent. While Mike Brady is depicted as being a widower, Schwartz originally wanted the character of Carol Brady to have been a divorcée, but the network objected to this. A compromise was reached whereby Carol's marital status (whether she was divorced or widowed) was never directly revealed.

Schwartz shopped the series to the "big three" television networks of the era. ABC, CBS, and NBC all liked the script, but each network wanted changes before they would commit to filming, so Schwartz shelved the project.[14] Although similarities exist between the series and two 1968 theatrical release films, United Artists' Yours, Mine and Ours (starring Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball) and CBS's With Six You Get Eggroll (starring Brian Keith and Doris Day), the original script for The Brady Bunch predated the scripts for both of these films. Nonetheless, the outstanding success of Yours, Mine and Ours (the 11th-highest-grossing film of 1968) was a factor in ABC's decision to order episodes for the series.[13]

After receiving a commitment for 13 weeks of television shows from ABC in 1968, Schwartz hired film and television director John Rich to direct the pilot, then called "The Brady Brood", cast the six children from 264 interviews during that summer, and hired the actors to play the mother, father, and housekeeper roles.[15] For the part of the father, Schwartz originally cast Bob Holiday, who was well known for portraying Superman in a Broadway musical, but since Holiday had little on-camera experience, network executives overrode Schwartz's decision and gave the role to TV veteran Robert Reed.[16] As the sets were built on Paramount Television stage 5, adjacent to the stage where H.R. Pufnstuf was filmed by Sid and Marty Krofft, who later produced The Brady Bunch Hour,[17] the production crew prepared the backyard of a home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, as the exterior location for the chaotic backyard wedding scene. Filming of the pilot began on Friday, October 4, 1968, and lasted eight days.

The theme song, written by Schwartz and Frank De Vol, and originally arranged, sung, and performed by Paul Parrish, Lois Fletcher, and John Beland under the name the Peppermint Trolley Company, quickly communicated to audiences that the Bradys were a blended family.[18] As described above, the Brady family is shown in a three-by-three grid, tic-tac-toe board-style graphic with Carol in the top center, Alice in the middle block, and Mike in the bottom center. To the right are three blocks with the boys from the oldest on top to the youngest. To the left are three blocks with the girls from the oldest to the youngest. In season two, the Brady kids took over singing the theme song. In season three, the boys sing the first verse, girls sing the second verse, and all sing together for the third and last verse. In season four, a new version is recorded with the same structure as the season three version, but in season five, the season three version returns. Utilizing Christopher Chapman's "multi-dynamic image technique", a version of which had famously appeared in the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair, the sequence was created and filmed by Howard A. Anderson Jr., a visual effects pioneer who worked on the title sequences for many popular television series.[19] The use of this innovation here became so familiar through the sitcom's popularity that it was referred to in the press as the "Brady Bunch effect".[7][8]

The end credits feature an instrumental version of the theme song's third verse. In season one, it was recorded by the Peppermint Trolley Company. From season two on, the theme was recorded in-house by Paramount musicians.

The house, built in 1959 and used in exterior shots, is located in Studio City, within the city limits of Los Angeles. It originally bore little relation to the interior of the Bradys' on-screen home, but was gutted and renovated in 2018 to match the layout of the soundstage sets. According to a 1994 article in the Los Angeles Times, the San Fernando Valley house was built in 1959 and selected as the Brady residence because series creator Schwartz felt it looked like a home where an architect would live.[20] A false window was attached to the front's A-frame section to give the illusion that it had two full stories (the 2018/19 renovation installed a real window where the false one was in the TV show footage).[21] Contemporary establishing shots of the house were filmed with the owner's permission for the 1990 TV series The Bradys. The owner refused to allow Paramount to restore the property to its 1969 look for The Brady Bunch Movie in 1995, so a facade resembling the original home was built around an existing house.

The house was put up for sale, for the first time since 1973, in the summer of 2018 with an asking price of $1.885 million.[22] Cable network HGTV outbid seven others for it, including NSYNC's Lance Bass.[23] HGTV has expanded the home for its original series A Very Brady Renovation, with the goal of recreating each of the interior rooms used in the TV series (which had only existed as a Paramount Studios set) while maintaining the original exterior look from the street, and to make it fully habitable (unlike the sets made on Paramount soundstage #5). The six actors who played the TV children, and who also actively participated in the 2018/19 renovation, posed for a photo in front on November 1 the same year.[24] In May 2023, it was announced that HGTV was selling the house for $5.5 million.[25][26][27][28]

In the series, the address of the house was given as 4222 Clinton Way (as read aloud by Carol from an arriving package in the first-season episode entitled "Lost Locket, Found Locket", and "Clinton Way" is clearly legible on Marcia's driver permit in the fifth-season episode "The Driver's Seat").[29] Although no city was ever specified, it was presumed from references to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Los Angeles Rams, and a Hollywood film studio, among many others, that the Bradys lived in Southern California, most likely Los Angeles or one of its suburbs.[30][31]

The interior sets of the Brady house were used at least three times for other Paramount TV shows while The Brady Bunch was still in production: twice for Mannix and once for Mission: Impossible. In the case of Mission: Impossible, the Brady furniture was also used.[32][33][34] A re-creation of the Brady house was constructed for the X-Files episode "Sunshine Days", which also revolved around The Brady Bunch.

Since its national launch in 2010, the Weigel Broadcasting-owned classic-TV network MeTV has aired a weekly block of the show every Sunday early afternoon promoted as the "Brady Bunch Brunch".[36] MeTV's sister network Catchy Comedy airs the show weekday mornings.

The Brady Bunch is also available through video-on-demand services Hulu and Paramount+, although neither streamer offers the complete collection of episodes in its entirety.

In West Germany, the show premiered on ZDF under the name Drei Mädchen und drei Jungen ("Three Girls and Three Boys") on August 8, 1971, with episode six "A Clubhouse Is Not A Home", and was shown on Sunday afternoons until halfway through Season 4, culminating with episode 77 "Cyrano De Brady" on October 5, 1974.[37] Some episodes were omitted. From 1984 to 1998, reruns would sporadically occur on Sat.1. The later reunion show, "The Brady Girls Get Married/The Brady Brides" would be broadcast on ZDF as Eine Reizende Familie ("A Lovely Family") from October 18, 1984, to January 10, 1985.[38] The second half of Season 4, Season 5 and the omitted episodes would not premiere before 1997 on Comedy & Co.[39][40]

In Italy, under a RAI-Paramount deal, eight episodes were broadcast on Programma Nazionale (today RAI 1) from April 27 to June 15, 1973 under the name Album di famiglia.[41][42][43] In the late-70s, it would be shown again in Italian dub on Swiss and Istrian networks.[44][45] Years later, RAI bought the distribution rights again, and the show began airing on Rai 1 and later Rai 3 under the name La famiglia Brady (The Brady Family) starting on March 11, 1987.[46][47] It was later bought by Fininvest, that aired it on Italia 1 from July 9, 1990 and on Canale 5 from January 5, 1991.[48][49]

ITV broadcast the show in a number of United Kingdom regions, including Thames, Granada, Tyne Tees, Grampian and Ulster from 1975 to 1982.[50]

Ratings data prior to 1972 is scarce for shows that did not place in the Top 30. Beginning in 2017, The TV Ratings Guide began publishing vintage television ratings as they became readily available from old newspaper publishings. Season 4 ratings came from Variety year-end rankings dated May 30, 1973.[58] The Brady Bunch earned steady ratings during its primetime run (but never placed in the top 30 during the five years it aired) and was cancelled in 1974 after five seasons and 117 episodes; it was cancelled shortly after the series crossed the minimum threshold for syndication. At that point in the storyline, Greg graduated from high school and was about to enroll in college.[59]

The Brady Bunch was not an award-winning show at the time of its original broadcast in the 1970s. The series and its cast and crew were not nominated for an award until 1989, when Barry Williams was honored with the Former Child Star Lifetime Achievement Award at the 10th Youth in Film Awards.[60]

All other awards and nominations for the series have come from the TV Land Awards:

Also includes solo singles as indicated.

A final-season Brady Bunch episode, "Kelly's Kids", was intended as a pilot for a prospective spin-off series of the same name. Ken Berry starred as Ken Kelly, a friend and neighbor of the Bradys, who with his wife Kathy (Brooke Bundy) adopted three orphaned boys of different racial backgrounds. One of the adopted sons was played by Todd Lookinland, the younger brother of Mike Lookinland. While Kelly's Kids was not subsequently picked up as a full series, producer Sherwood Schwartz reworked the basic premise for the short-lived 1980s sitcom Together We Stand starring Elliott Gould and Dee Wallace.[65]

A 22-episode animated Saturday morning cartoon series, produced by Filmation and airing on ABC from September 1972 to August 1974, is about the Brady kids having various adventures.[66] The family's adults were never seen or mentioned, and the "home" scenes were in a very large, well-appointed tree house. Several animals were regular characters, including two non-English-speaking pandas (Ping and Pong), a talking bird (Merlin) which could do magic, and an ordinary pet dog (Mop Top). The first 17 episodes featured the voices of all six of the original child actors from the show, but Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, and Christopher Knight were replaced for the last five episodes due to a contract dispute.

On November 28, 1976, a one-hour television special entitled The Brady Bunch Variety Hour aired on ABC. Eve Plumb was the only regular cast member from the original show who declined to be in the series and the role of Jan was recast with Geri Reischl.[67] Produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, the sibling team behind H.R. Pufnstuf, Donny and Marie, and other variety shows and children's series of the era, the show was intended to air every fifth week in the same slot as The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, but ended up being scheduled sporadically throughout the season, leading to inconsistent ratings and its inevitable cancellation.

In 2009, Brady Bunch cast member Susan Olsen, with Lisa Sutton, published a book, Love to Love You Bradys, which dissects and celebrates the Variety Hour as a cult classic.[68]

The Brady Bunch
Also known as	The Brady Brides
Genre	Sitcom
Created by	Sherwood Schwartz Lloyd J. Schwartz
Directed by	Peter Baldwin
Starring	Maureen McCormick Eve Plumb Jerry Houser Ron Kuhlman Florence Henderson Ann B. Davis Keland Love
Theme music composer	Frank De Vol
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	10
Production
Executive producers	Sherwood Schwartz Lloyd J. Schwartz
Producer	John Thomas Lenox
Production locations	Paramount Studios, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Cinematography	Lester Shorr
Running time	25 minutes
Production companies	Redwood Productions Paramount Television
Release
Original network	NBC[69][59]
Original release	February 6 (1981-02-06) – April 17, 1981 (1981-04-17)
Related
The Brady Bunch Hour A Very Brady Christmas The Brady Bunch

A TV reunion film called The Brady Girls Get Married was produced in 1981. Although scheduled to be shown in its original full-length film format, NBC decided at the last minute to divide it into half-hour segments and show one part a week for three weeks. The fourth week debuted a spin-off sitcom titled The Brady Brides, which carried on from where the reunion film left off. The film featured the entire original cast; this proved to be the only time the entire cast worked together on a single project following the cancellation of the original series (the complete surviving cast also appeared in these official projects together: Brady Bunch Home Movies from 1995, The Brady Bunch 35th Anniversary Reunion Special: Still Brady After All These Years from 2004, as well as various reunion programs in 2019 for the 50th anniversary). The film's opening credits featured the season-one "Grid" and theme song, with the addition of The Brady Girls Get Married title.[70] The film shows what the characters had been doing since the original series ended: Mike is still an architect, Carol is a real-estate agent, Greg is a doctor, Marcia is a fashion designer, Peter is in the Air Force, Jan is also an architect, Bobby and Cindy are in college, and Alice has married Sam. Eventually, they all reunite for Marcia and Jan's double wedding.

The Brady Brides features Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb reprising their respective roles as Marcia and Jan Brady. The series begins with Marcia and Jan and their new husbands buying a house and living together. The clashes between Jan's uptight and conservative husband, Philip Covington III (a college professor in science who is several years older than Jan, played by Ron Kuhlman) and Marcia's slovenly and more bohemian husband, Wally Logan (a fun-loving salesman for a large toy company, played by Jerry Houser), were the pivot on which many of the stories were based, not unlike The Odd Couple. Florence Henderson and Ann B. Davis also appeared regularly. Ten episodes were aired before the sitcom was cancelled. This was the only Brady show in sitcom form to be filmed in front of a live studio audience. Bob Eubanks guest-starred as himself in an episode where the two couples appear on The Newlywed Game.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, The Brady Girls Get Married was rerun on various networks in its original full-length film format.

In 2019, the series was released on DVD for the first time as a part of The Brady-est Brady Bunch TV & Movie Collection.

A second TV reunion film, A Very Brady Christmas, aired in December 1988 on CBS and features most of the regular cast (except Susan Olsen, who was on her honeymoon at the time of filming; the role of Cindy was played by Jennifer Runyon), as well as three grandchildren, Peter's girlfriend, Valerie, and the spouses of Greg, Marcia, and Jan (Nora, Wally, and Phillip, respectively).[71] The Nielsen ratings for A Very Brady Christmas were the highest of any television film that season for CBS.[72]

Due to the success of A Very Brady Christmas, CBS asked Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz and son Lloyd to create a new series for the network. According to Lloyd Schwartz, he and his father initially balked at the idea because they felt a new series would harm the Brady franchise. They finally relented because CBS was "desperate for programming". A new series featuring the Brady clan was created entitled The Bradys. All original Brady Bunch cast members returned for the series, except for Maureen McCormick (Marcia), who was replaced with Leah Ayres.

As with A Very Brady Christmas, The Bradys also balanced elements of comedy and drama and featured storylines of a more serious nature than the original series and subsequent spin-offs. Lloyd Schwartz later said he compared The Bradys to another dramedy of the time, thirtysomething. The two-hour series premiere episode aired on February 9, 1990, at 9 pm on CBS and initially drew respectable ratings. Subsequent episodes were moved to 8 pm, where ratings quickly declined. Due to the decline, CBS cancelled the series after six episodes.[73]

The Day by Day episode titled "A Very Brady Episode" (February 5, 1989), on NBC, reunited six of the original Brady Bunch cast members: Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Ann B. Davis, Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland and Maureen McCormick.[74][75]

A one-hour TV special retrospective of The Brady Bunch hosted by Florence Henderson who introduces a montage of various episodes of the original series, and also examines the show's phenomenal after-life, illustrated by clips from spin-offs and other incarnations of the series. Also, cast members Christopher Knight, Susan Olsen, Mike Lookinland, Barry Williams, Ann B. Davis, and creator Sherwood Schwartz reflect on the impact of the show on their lives. Directed by Malcolm Leo, the special was originally broadcast on ABC on May 19, 1993.[76]

Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland, Maureen McCormick, Susan Olsen, Eve Plumb, and Barry Williams reunited for the 2019 HGTV series A Very Brady Renovation, which follows a full renovation (interior mostly) of the real house, used for the sitcom's exterior shots, into the fictional Brady house.[77][78][79]

In conjunction with the Renovation series, in the autumn of 2019, The Food Network aired two episodes of their program Chopped with the siblings as guest judges. Season 43, episode 3 - "Brady Bunch Bash" features Williams, Plumb, and Lookinland judging meals made from Hawaiian ingredients.[80] Season 43, episode 4 - "A Very Brady Chopped" features McCormick, Knight, and Olsen judging meals from "groovy" ingredients of the '70s.[81]

In October 2020, Ogunquit Playhouse did a live stream broadcast of A Very Brady Musical, a brand new musical adventure for the stage created by Lloyd J. Schwartz (son of Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz), Hope Juber (book/lyrics), and Laurence Juber (music/lyrics) and directed by Richard Israel. It was co-produced by Ogunquit Playhouse, Purple Mountain Productions, and Broadway and Beyond Theatricals. More in the vein of the Brady films, this PG-13 story follows the Brady kids’ misadventures when they come to the mistaken conclusion that Mike and Carol are headed for divorce. After consulting Alice, the kids raise money to pay for marriage counseling, learning valuable lessons along the way, as their respective well-intentioned ideas land them in outrageous trouble. Barry Williams and Christopher Knight were on hand for a post-show question and answer session on all things Brady.[82]

On June 30, 2021, streaming service Paramount+ celebrated Pride Month with the premiere of a crossover special combining The Brady Bunch and the reality television series RuPaul's Drag Race. In the crossover event, original Brady cast members and former Drag Race competitors come together to recreate a Brady Bunch episode. Christopher Knight and Mike Lookinland reprise their roles of Peter and Bobby Brady, respectively, while the original Greg Brady, Barry Williams, switches parts to play family patriarch Mike; Greg Brady is portrayed by Drag Race Season 6 and Allstars 3 competitor BenDeLaCreme. Season 6 winner Bianca Del Rio fills the role of mother Carol Brady, and daughters Marcia, Jan, and Cindy are portrayed by Allstars 5 winner Shea Couleé, season 2 and Allstars 6 competitor Kylie Sonique Love, and season 13 runner-up Kandy Muse, respectively. Season 11 Miss Congeniality Nina West appears as housekeeper Alice Nelson.[83]

The special, which recreates the season two episode "Will the Real Jan Brady Please Stand Up?", also contains cameos by Drag Race judges RuPaul and Michelle Visage, who appear as employees of a wig shop that Jan patronizes. The original Jan and Cindy Brady, Eve Plumb and Susan Olsen, also appear as children who are guests at the birthday party.[83]

In January 2022, Christopher Knight and Barry Williams published their new podcast The Real Brady Bros. The weekly podcast recaps episodes of The Brady Bunch. Eve Plumb, Susan Olsen and Mike Lookinland have guested to discuss episodes in which they have featured.