Do fans of the Brady Bunch TV show like the Brady Bunch movies?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by MRamble, Nov 27, 2021.

  1. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Apparently, neither his agent nor anybody else had told Robert Reed, "hey, you're doing a show created by the producer of Gilligan's Island, and it's a really silly family sitcom, and the kids are more of the stars than you are. Shut up and take the money!"

    By all reports, Schwartz was fed up with Robert Reed's petulant antics and was literally going to fire him if they had been renewed for a sixth season. But it never happened. What's bizarre to me is that Robert Reed had no complaints about the horrific short-lived variety shows they did in the 1970s, which were bad beyond belief. I mean jaw-droppingly, OUTSTANDINGLY bad.

    [​IMG]

    Or bad Television, in this case.
     
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  2. geetar_await

    geetar_await I heart Linux.

    Location:
    USA
    So what was Robert Reed expecting before he signed onto The Brady Bunch? I guess I never understood all his frustrations with the show if he knew what he was signing on for.
     
  3. Kyle B

    Kyle B Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    Reed had a contract with Paramount, which produced The Brady Bunch. The other two pilots he was earlier attached to didn’t work out. He did the Brady pilot to fulfill his contractual obligation to Paramount, and hoped it wouldn’t be picked up to series.
     
  4. Grand_Ennui

    Grand_Ennui Forum Resident

    Location:
    WI

    Does the phrase "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" ring a bell? The stereotype was there, that being the 'good looking, popular older sister' getting all the attention, while the middle daughter is trying to get her two cents in, while being treated as some sort of frumpy bookworm... And Peter, while not quite as knocked around as Jan was, he seemed like he was dealing with his own 'middle child' dilemmas. I seem to remember Greg being some sort of athletic type, so there was 'the jock' too (although he really wanted to be Johnny Bravo!).
     
  5. Grand_Ennui

    Grand_Ennui Forum Resident

    Location:
    WI
    They should have given the role to Gene Hackman.
     
  6. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    I'm a big fan of the show and I thought the movies were very funny and hit just the right tone of humor. :)
     
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  7. MikaelaArsenault

    MikaelaArsenault Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Hampshire
    MeTV just showed A Very Brady Christmas the other day.
     
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  8. Pizza

    Pizza With extra pepperoni

    Location:
    USA
    I don’t really understand why you feel fans of the show must hate the Brady movies. Should Monkees fans also hate the movie? It’s just a comedy movie and, at this point, is probably more forgotten now than the TV series. I love all of the above btw, the series, the comedy movies and the Monkees.
     
  9. Hanglow

    Hanglow Forum Resident

    Location:
    Saratoga New York
    Then we would've had Robert Reed as Popeye Doyle...hey,thinking outside the box :righton:
     
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  10. fspringer

    fspringer Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York City
    I loved both. And, yes, like most kids of the 70s, I had the show drilled into my brain, first in real-time episodes, and then with endless after-school reruns for a huge chunk of the 1970s.

    Before the movies, I should also note that in downtown Manhattan, I saw The Real Live Brady Bunch (video below) perform quite a few episodes onstage that were pure kitsch and great fun for 70s kids (who were then late 20s into early 30s). I would guess these shows were the impetus for the movies that followed, that same sense of double entendres and sending the show up. They were the perfect balance of affectionate, knowing and nod/wink satire, and I recall the audience going wild each time. The 90s were the right time for 70s nostalgia (thus, Dazed and Confused), and this stuff really hit home. I do recall younger audience members shaking their heads and not having a clue why some lines ("oh my nose!") were so wildly funny to most of the audience.

    But I must admit: while I really enjoyed the movies, I don't own them. Nor the show itself, which is buried in the dark recesses of my mind like repressed memory.

     
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  11. Stencil

    Stencil Forum Resident

    Location:
    Lockport, IL
    I was a bit too old to like the show when it was on. I was 10 in 1969, but I had to watch it every week when I babysat my nieces and nephews. I thought the movies were hilarious when they came out and really the only way to make a movie of the show. What I really love is the BB Variety Hour. I cant look away. Its like Videodrome.
     
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  12. Kyle B

    Kyle B Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago
    But Sherwood Schwartz wasn’t involved in the variety show and that was a selling point for Reed, who really disliked Schwartz more than he disliked the material. And he never wanted to pass up an opportunity to work with the kids. The kids were surprised that Reed actually liked doing the variety show, because it was an opportunity to do something different (singing and dancing).

    Good point about the popular older sister issue. But the stereotypes were never as strong as the ones on Family Ties or Growing Pains - where you had the smart, nerdy kids and the dumb popular kids, and those stereotypes were the defining trait of each character. The middle child issue for Jan only came up in a few episodes, albeit famous ones. I don’t remember it being an issue for Peter. And Greg, while he played football, wasn’t really the jock type, and sports weren’t really central to his identity.
     
  13. Spitfire

    Spitfire Senior Member

    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    First movie was great. I was a fan of the original series too
     
  14. Jack Lord

    Jack Lord Forum Resident

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    I think it is easy to understand. Reed was a classically trained actor who dreamt of doing Shakespeare and Dickens, but ended up on TV doing fun but ultimately specious shows. Like a lot of people in a lot of fields, he felt he was not living up to his potential. This caused resentment and passive-aggressive behavior on the set. It's a paradox. You need the work and the money, but you consider it beneath you. You feel you could do better, but cannot. So you take it out on others, mostly Sherwood Schwartz. It's not cool, not nice, not rational, but it is understandable.

    As time went on, he seemed to mellow out, accept his career for what it was (in reality very successful), and embraced the character- evidenced by his agreement to participate in the later reunions.

    Similar examples of this could be found serving on the USS Enterprise. Or singing lead for a family band in San Pueblo, CA.

    A staunch commitment to artistic sensibility collides with the need to pay the bills.
     
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  15. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!


    I have every Brady Bunch episode on DVD, all five seasons, and love 'em. But, I don't care about any of the movies. To me, they are worthless, mainly because they don't (and can't) feature all of the original cast.
     
  16. intv7

    intv7 Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston, MA, USA
    Yes. The first movie was great.

    The sequel was an abomination. The writers didn't seem to grasp what made the first movie work at all.

    In The Brady Bunch Movie, the family wasn't a bunch of idiots -- they essentially had the same characteristics and viewpoints that the characters had in the early '70s. The joke was that these people were living in the radically different world of the mid-'90s, and were hopelessly out of touch.

    In A Very Brady Sequel, they just turned them into very dumb people who were completely oblivious to just about everything, making them easily manipulated. A real shame, because they had the advantage of including more storylines and events from the series -- stuff like Marcia's nose, the trip to Hawaii, George Glass, etc. But they completely blew it by framing all of it around a storyline that made the family out to look like a bunch of morons, which was a huge swing and miss.
     
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  17. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    People seem to forget that The Brady Bunch changed notably over the course of its run, and Reed didn't start complaining until around season four. In the first two seasons, The Brady Bunch was a lightweight drama with comedic overtones, very similar in tone to Family Affair or Eddie's Father. It was sentimental fluff but always grounded in reality. As the series progressed though, plotlines became sillier and the tone shifted. If you read Reed's memos, what he was specifically objecting to were storylines that crossed over into ridiculousness, implausibility, or Gilligan-style wackiness: Peter meeting a classmate who just happened to be his exact twin, or Bobby selling hair tonic that turns Greg's hair orange on the eve of graduation... these aren't things that happen in the real world. He also objected to an episode that ended with a slapstick pie fight, because it wasn't consistent with the tone of the series. So it wasn't that he was expecting the scripts to be Shakespeare, it was that he wanted to maintain a consistent tone and grounding in reality. By the end of its run, Brady Bunch was not the same as the series he'd sighed onto.
     
  18. Hanglow

    Hanglow Forum Resident

    Location:
    Saratoga New York
    Right,there gets to a point where your "classically trained" background has to take a backseat when it comes to putting food on the table.He could've stayed in dinner theater :shrug:Don't think that TV movie he did "Secret Night Caller" would get misconstrued as Shakespearean:whistle:
     
  19. Neil Anderson

    Neil Anderson Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, Oregon
    i read Barry Williams's book where he reprinted several of Reed's memos, and I thought they were very great. Reed was a smart guy. I also got the impression he thought the show had unrealized potential.
     
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  20. Jack Lord

    Jack Lord Forum Resident

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    I would have to say Reed was thinking too much. The Brady Bunch was what it was- an inane but innocent comedy. Basically the last of a genre that included Ozzy & Harriet, Father Knows Best, Dennis the Menace, etc. There was not much more potential to be realized.

    I would be curious if he ever noted that having 3 boys and 3 girls- who were not biologically related to one another and all more or less attractive- share 1 bathroom was not a bit much.
     
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  21. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    His memo about "Batman in the operating room" is quite perceptive... more thought went into that than probably went into the writing of most of the episodes. What's notable to me is that his complaints are not self-serving... he doesn't say "I'm not being challenged in this role" or "Mike Brady needs to be more prominent" or anything like that. Rather, he seems to be motivated by a genuine concern over the quality of the series. He sees the writing as becoming lazy and increasingly inconsistent with the established tone of the series.

    The show was inane but it became more inane as time went on, and as I've noted it also started to shift in tone, which is the main thing that bothered Reed. The changes are kind of similar to what happened to Happy Days over its first few seasons... it's like if Tom Bosley had written a memo about the silliness of Fonzie suddenly being able to water-ski over a shark. Reed probably was thinking too much as you say. One can argue that the show was always crap, so he shouldn't have cared if it became inconsistent in tone or inconsistent with the established rules of its fictional universe. But if nothing else, his objections were motivated by concern over the quality of the show. It wasn't a case of him egotistically thinking the show was beneath him, as it's often mis-characterized.
     
  22. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    It was a dumb TV sitcom, it was always a dumb TV sitcom, and that covers everything Sherwood Schwartz ever did. Every situation comedy on television for decades had implausible, unbelievable, silly, and stupid plot elements, going back to I Love Lucy and beyond. You can't expect a) stories to make sense or b) any kind of attempt to spin real-world drama on the situations. I think Robert Reed realized he was trapped in a contract on a sh!tty show. There were friends who dropped by the set and would tell him, "jesus, you were up for an Emmy on The Defenders back in 1961, and now you're on this?" So he realized his career had taken an unfortunate turn, because of his own bad decisions and bad luck. And yet there were a thousand actors who would kill to be on a show like this, stupid or not.

    I 100% agree with this.
     
  23. czeskleba

    czeskleba Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Regardless of whether you think it was always a dumb sitcom (an opinion with which I pretty much agree) the fact is that the style of writing on the show did change. And the change in tone was the basis of his complaints... he wasn't writing memos saying the show was beneath his talents.
     
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  24. Jamey K

    Jamey K Internet Sensation

    Location:
    Amarillo,Texas
    Loved then. Jennifer Elise Cox's Jan, is a riot.
     
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  25. Scopitone

    Scopitone Caught the last train for the coast

    Location:
    Denver, CO
    The two 90s films are fantastic representations of the original show. They recognize the silly bits of the original series, but their jokes are never mean-spirited. It's a loving tribute IMO, both heartwarming and funny.
     
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