Moving into the 70s with “The Brady Bunch.”
Now here’s a story more progressive than one might expect for the 1970s. Two single parents, one widowed and the other for reasons unknown, end up in a marriage in which they each bring in three kids of their own.
Carol Brady, played by the famous Florence Henderson, and Mike Brady, portrayed by Robert Reed, had six of the most famous kids on television. Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby, Cindy and housekeeper Alice made up the Brady bunch, and most of the high jinks on the show.
Revolving around the dynamic of merging two families and children having a passion for singing, the show endeavored to make people laugh for five years into the early 1970s.
The show, created by the same man who made Gilligan’s Island, focused simultaneously on life as a blended family and on the simple themes of growing up. Though it did not capture the attention of audiences immediately while on air, reruns have made the show a staple in sitcom history.
So then what is even interesting about “The Brady Bunch?”
Much like his unintentional spark of creativity with Gilligan’s Island, show creator Sherwood Schwartz created the show based on a newspaper statistic. After reading that nearly one-third of all marriages have a child from another marriage, Schwartz realized there was an opening for representation on television.
Taking the idea and running with the progressive notion of a blended family shows just how far television came from “I Love Lucy.” Where men and women were not to sleep in the same bed, shows were now implying divorce and remarriage with an abundance of kids.
The show was not just progressive in marriage ideas either. For a short time, Florence Henderson really wanted Carol Brady to have a job of her own. She thought that since the housekeeper Alice was doing all the work around the house, Carol should hold her own work.
Unfortunately, the networks were not ready for a woman to be the main breadwinner in the family just yet.
The sitcom also made attempts at racial diversity by having a couple move in next door with adopted children of different backgrounds. This attempt was actually a pilot for a potential spin-off that ABC rejected.
What makes the show in its reruns an all-American classic is that it provided some of the most classic and necessary life lessons to people of all ages.
Perhaps one of the most important lessons to come from the show comes from the episode that elicited the famous, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” line from her sister Jan Brady.
Being the middle sister, Jan feels in this episode, and obviously in many others, that anything she does is constantly overshadowed by her older sister. She wishes that she could be as perfect and great as her sister seemingly is. She claims that everyone at school is always talking about how wonderful Marcia is at one thing or another and that she simply continues to get awards.
This prompts Jan to take vengeance on Marcia’s awards, an action no one is happy about. After having words with her sister, Carol and Mike Brady sit down with Jan to comfort her. Carol repeats this line to her daughter, “It’s like your father and I always say. Find out what you do best, and then do your best with it.”
The point of this episode is to remind Jan that life is not about comparing yourself to others, but about finding what you are good at, and what makes you happy, and being your best at that thing.
Though not everyone can relate to this on a sibling-level, it’s even more true now than it was then that it is hard to not compare yourself to the success of others. That makes these words ring as true as they did in the early 1970s.
It turns out that even when there is intense drama behind the scenes, a good moral message can mean more to a show, and a society, than any creator could imagine. That’s simply the story of a lovely lady, and a man named Brady.
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