Sat, August 9, 2003

Ah, ratings. Home of the micro-rant. This time, let's evaluate those six lovable scamps from the Brady household and – what the hey – why not the grownups, too?

Bobby

I know that annoying precociousness was sort of the trademark of the show, but Bobby was always too annoyingly precocious for me. And that episode where he was appointed hall monitor or whatever and the power went to his head? What a prick! Mike Lookinland did, however, fulfill his child TV star destiny by ending up with his mugshot on thesmokinggun.com. Also, he was the only one played by his own kid in the recent behind-the-scenes TV movie.

Cindy

I thought Cindy was pretty damn cute, and her speech impediment just added to it. The curls were cute and she seemed to have a lot of story lines where she was trying to do the right thing even if it didn't work out. Kind of like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I also think it's great that Susan Olsen was rumored to have died of a drug overdose but is actually perfectly fine.

Peter

In my experience, the middle kids were pretty easy to forget. Over the course of the show, they did have the most story lines that centered around "growing up," which was nice, but other than that I really don't remember anything about them.

Jan

In the recent big screen adaptations, Jan is kind of the butt of all the jokes and is played for a bumbling interloper with no identity of her own. I don't remember it that way from the TV show at all. I like Jan because I fondly remember Barry Williams discussing Eve Plumb's chest in Growing Up Brady. The kids were growing up together on the show, and he was distracted upon returning from one summer hiatus to find that Maureen's breasts had developed and that "Eve was acquiring quite a set." Something about that turn of phrase has stuck with me.

Greg

I have no tolerance for people who think they're cool, whether they actually are cool like Brad Pitt or just think they are like Quentin Tarantino. Greg Brady truly believed he was cool, despite all evidence to the contrary, and often lorded it over the other kids. He always felt like he had sage advice to offer or he could "teach Marcia a lesson" by subjecting her to some behavior of his. Douche bag.

Marcia

Marcia was easy to like because she was smart, popular, and hot. Maureen McCormick was plenty hot, but Marcia only got hotter when Ben Stiller's wife played her on the big screen. She was a little conceited, but only in a way that she was completely entitled to be. I mean, she was better than the other kids, after all.

Mike

Mike was the straight man, mostly because Robert Reed wanted the show to be about family values and not silly hijinks, so he played it straight and tried to shoehorn in the "moral" to every episode. It was a creative struggle, but I think it suited the show. It's funnier and more entertaining for the dad to kind of not be in on most of the jokes.

Carol

Not enough was made of Florence Henderson's sex appeal. This is mostly due to ABC's inane hyper-censorship as far as the family standards on the show – they weren't even allowed to have a toilet in the bathroom! According to Williams's book, the producers had to check to make sure Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb were wearing brassieres on the set. (What a great book!) Ordinarily, the saccharine family-values style went well with the campy astroturf-lawn tone of the show, but I do regret that we didn't get any story lines featuring Carol as the "sexy mom."

Alice

Ann B. Davis was the best thing on The Brady Bunch. It's the only reason I regretted the film adaptations in the '90s, because Henriette Mantel could never live up to how great Davis was as Alice. Without Alice, you could never have had other Housekeepers Who Were More Often Social Secretaries like Mr. Belvedere and Benson.

Sam

I'm not really a Brady buff, so I don't know how much Sam the Butcher featured in the show. As far as I recall, he was a pretty occasional guest. However, in The Brady Bunch Movie when one of the kids comes downstairs late at night and asks why he's in the house, his reply, "I'm ...uh... just delivering some meat," is the longest and hardest laugh I've had at the movies, second only to Joe's "You better shut that baby up."

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