Five Bizarre Attempts to Continue the Brady Bunch Franchise

 

The Brady Bunch is one of the staple classics of television. Despite the show never receiving much critical praise, or even being that big of a hit during it's five season run, in syndication, the show had become one of the most well known television series of all time. Today almost everybody has at least a passing familiarity of the story of a man with three sons and a woman with three daughters getting married and creating a blended family with six children. Several of the series episodes have gone on to rank among the top episodes of television of all time. It's no wonder that with the belated success of the series, people have tried time and time again to recapture the magic of The Brady Bunch. While the original show is still remembered fondly by many fans today, almost nobody remembers the many bizarre attempts at making a Brady Bunch successor. 

The Brady Kids

The first series actually aired while The Brady Bunch was still on the air. This was an animated series featuring the six Brady children. The adults of the family, Mike, Carol and Alice the housekeeper, are never mentioned in the series and whenever the Brady children aren't out on adventures their home base appears to be a tree house of some kind rather than the usual Brady home. Additionally, as it was popular for animated series at the time, new characters were added, specifically talking animals. The Brady family gained a talking dog named Mop Top. Their dog from the live action series is never mentioned in this show. Also, they befriend a talking bird named Marlon who also happens to be a wizard and can perform magic. 

The Brady Bunch Hour

Variety shows were popular in the late 1970s and The Brady Bunch tried to cash in on that trend as well. The Brady Bunch Hour featured the Bradys hosting a national Variety show complete with songs and sketches. Not the actors who played the characters of the Brady Family, mind you. This was a show hosted by the Bradys themselves. The premise of the show was that the family was chosen to host a new Variety show and moved to a new house in California. A new neighbor character was added to the cast as well, and became a love interest for Alice the housekeeper who had moved across the country with the family. The show would feature several songs, but would also have a side story each episode about having to produce the show within the show. One of the most memorable parts of the show, was the recasting of Jan. While actress Eve Plumb was originally supposed to reprise the role that she had in the original series, she didn't want to commit to the possibility of having to do the show over the next five years. She agreed to return for the initial episode order, but was told that it was all or nothing, resulting in the role of Jan being cast last minute. 

Oddly enough, in some ways this series has become as big a part of the cultural narrative of The Brady Bunch as the original show. The idea that the Bradys sang and performed as a family was really cemented as an integral part of the group with this series. 

Kelly's Kids/Together We Stand/Nothing is Easy

In the final season of the original Brady Bunch series, there was an idea to use one of the episodes to introduce new characters with the intent of spinning these new characters into a series of their own. This backdoor pilot episode was called Kelly's Kids and featured a friend and neighbor of the Bradys who adopted three different boys all of different racial backgrounds. The idea was that we would follow this family's adventures into their own series which would also be called Kelly's Kids. The series ended up not getting picked up in it's current form but was reworked into a tv show called Together We Stand, which carried the same basic premise as Kelly's Kids but featured all new actors playing different characters. Together We Stand was supposed to cover the same general topics of the characters having to learn about cultural differences each episodes, but six episodes in, the family's father character, played by Elliott Gould was killed off and the series was reworked once again to focus on his wife's life as a single mother. With that adjustment the series was once again renamed to Nothing is Easy, but it never found much more success than it did with it's first two incarnations. 

The Brady Brides

In 1981, a reunion television movie was made called The Brady Girls get married and was set up to feature the double wedding of Jan and Marsha Brady who were both getting married on the same day. Before the movie could air, it was instead reworked into three half hour episodes that then evolved into a whole new series called The Brady Brides, where Jan and Marsha, along with their husbands moved in together. A large part of the series comedy came from the fact that the girls married husbands with wildly different personalities, one being an uptight professor and the other being a bit of an easy going slob, giving the two characters and "Odd Couple" vibe to work with. While Jan and Marsha were the only two Brady children to become full time characters in this new series, their mother Carol Brady, and Alice the housekeeper both showed up several times over the series short ten episode run. Also interesting to note, while The Brady Bunch usually used a laugh track for all Brady Bunch series (including the cartoon),  this was the only one to ever film before a live audience. 

The Bradys

By the late 1980s, The Brady Bunch was finally considered a classic piece of television history and the reunion movie A Very Brady Christmas wound up being the highest viewed television movie of the year for CBS. Based on the success of the movie, CBS decided to try and revive The Brady Bunch in a brand new series. Almost all of the original cast returned with the Brady Kids all now full fledged adults, and the series first aired in 1990. Unlike any other installment of The Brady Bunch franchise, the episodes in this series were an hour long each instead of the usual half hour format. The series also veered much further into dramatic territory with storylines exploring alcoholism and abusive relationships among other issues. Despite The Bradys move towards drama the series still featured a laugh track. It turns out that people weren't that interested in watching sitcom characters from the 70s deal with the problems of the real world. The ratings for the series quickly fell off and the show was canceled after six episodes.