1969 sitcom “The Brady Bunch” was progressive and retrogressive at the same time. On the one hand, it vaunted the virtues of remarrying and finding new families, showing that step-siblings and second spouses could produce as harmonious a domestic unit as more traditional nuclear families. On the other hand, the characters were clean-cut and virtuous to a cartoonish degree, only expressing the blandest sorts of domestic turmoil. It’s easy to be harmonious when every member of the family is scrupulous and clean. The show was more about mild, silly pet peeves than about legitimately hard-hitting clashes of character.
Of course, “hard-hitting” was not Schwartz’s métier. He was a writer of high-concept, light-hearted comedies. This was, after all, the “Gilligan’s Island” guy. He wasn’t about to skew into Neil LaBute family dramas with “The Brady Bunch.”
And “The Brady Bunch” was huge. It lasted a gangbusters 117 episodes over its five seasons, and audiences got to witness Bobby, Cindy, Greg, Marcia, Peter, and Jan (Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen, Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, Christopher Knight, and Eve Plumb) all grow up in real time. A lot of youths watching developed crushes on one of the Brady kids during its initial run, or perhaps even on Mr. and Mrs. Brady, played by Robert Reed and Florence Henderson. And everyone loved the live-in maid, Alice (Ann B. Davis).
Some “Brady” obsessives may recall one or two of the show’s ill-fated spin-offs, and most fans recall the “Barbie”-like meta-reboot “The Brady Bunch Movie” from 1995 (and its follow-up “A Very Brady Sequel” in 1996), but there was a pile — a huuuge pile — of Bradyana that unexperienced pop culture spelunkers may not yet know about. Below is a list of all the Brady spinoffs you never learned about.
