“Brady Bunch”: silly fun, simmering anger

Bright and bouncy, “The Brady Bunch” just wanted to have fun.
It had cute kids, pretty parents and lots of sight gags. So what was it like making the show?
Rough, Lloyd Schwartz says in “TV We Love,” at 8 p.m. Monday (Oct. 20) on CW. Robert Reed (shown here, alongside his TV wife Florence Henderson and two of their daughters) “fought constantly” about scripts.
Reed — who died of cancer in 1992, at 59 — was outspoken about his anger, especially toward the “Brady” creator.
“It was a well-known fact in Hollywood that Sherwood Schwartz was absolutely the worst writer working in television,” he once said. “But that all changed one day (with) one writer who was even worse. It was Lloyd, Sherwood’s son.”
That comment was included in “Growing Up Brady” (Good Guy Entertainment, 1992) by Barry Williams, who played the oldest Brady kid — and who also specified: This rage “was not exhibited in front of us kids.”
The young actors were free to roam the studio , to play jokes, even (for Williams and Maureen McGovern, who played his step-sister) to romance. Out of their view, the fights continued; Williams quoted Lloyd Schwartz: “I think America looks at ‘The Brady Bunch,’ sees Bob and thinks, ‘Wow, what a great guy!’ I don’t think that they have a clue how impossible he really is.'”
Or was the show impossible for a skilled and well-trained actor to do? Reed said it had “no sense of reality whatsoever,”
That leads to two key questions:
1) Should “The Brady Bunch” really qualify as “TV we love”?
Yes … depending on who the “we” is. Critics hated the show and many adults ignored it. During its five-year run, ratings were so-so.
But this was an era when situation comedies were far from the mold of “Seinfeld,” “Friends” or “Frasier,”
Sherwood Schwartz had previously scored with “Gilligan’s Island.” Others had done “My Mother the Car” and such. When “Brady Bunch”debuted in 1969, sitcoms included “The Flying Nun,” “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
It was the “boob tube” era, Robert Thompson, founder of Syracuse University’s television and popular culture program, says in the CW hour. And “The Brady Bunch” was “the sitcom-iest of the sitcoms.”
Its reruns were sold to stations, which ran them in after-school slots. “TV We Love” includes plenty of people who grew up savoring the Bradys.
2) If Reed hated the show so much, why was he in it?
Actually, “TV We Love” points out, Sherwood Schwartz wanted Gene Hackman, who had been doing TV guest roles for almost a decade — plus a big movie splash in “Bonnie and Clyde.” The network preferred Reed, who had starred for four years in the acclaimed law drama “The Defenders.”
So Reed met with Schwartz and, he told Williams: “He fooled me. Sherwood has this remarkable facility for attaching a sociological concept, … but he hasn’t the least capability of being able to realize it.”
Schwartz talked about a show focusing on the trend toward blended families. Reed agreed, got the script and “was absolutely horrified …. It’s ‘Gilligan’ all over again, with just as much inanity.”
He agreed to do it, convinced it wouldn’t last long. He also secretly worked with the studio to do rewrites.
But “Brdy Bunch” kept going and kept getting looser and more kid-oriented. At his low point, Reed admitted, he did scenes while drunk. He refused to do the fifth-season finale, appalled by the notion of Greg’s hair turning orange.
Schwartz got secret approval to replace him for the sixth season — except then the show was canceled after five.
It went on to afternoon reruns and “The Brady Brides” and a variety show and movies and specials and the short-lived “The Bradys.” It became TV we (depending on which “we” you’re talking about) love.