The Brady Bunch

About The Brady Bunch

The Brady Bunch started as a popular, but not very highly rated family show, but has since become a pop-cultural phenomenon as one of the most beloved and talked about programs in television history.

The Brady Bunch premise was somewhat unconventional for the squeaky-clean late '60s. A mother with three daughters by one marriage (it was never specified if she was divorced or widowed) marries a widower with three boys, a maid and a dog. The first season of The Brady Bunch focused on the newly blended family and the conflicts that arose from the merge. After that, the remaining years were more about a wholesome, but large, family with universal plot lines that were familiar to anyone growing up in white, suburban, upper middle-class America.

One of the things that makes The Brady Bunch an enduring classic is that it spent little or no time on actual current events or fads, but focused on topics that were significant to any generation of kids. The show is as relevant today as it was originally and its warm, corny humour is often imitated, but never successfully copied. The Brady Bunch is the meatloaf and mashed potatoes of television comfort viewing that seems to get better the more you watch it.

The original Brady Bunch will forever remain a favourite, as will the endless fascination with Brady reunions. In addition to the Brady cartoon on Saturday mornings, The Brady Kids, there was The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, The Brady Girls Get Married, A Very Brady Christmas and The Bradys. Also, there were two successful feature film send-ups of the series, The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel and a stage show called The Real Live Brady Bunch.