Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (32 page)

Not to take anything away from the performance of our substitute-Cindy, Jennifer Runyon, who did a fine job in a tough situation, but Susan was missed. We were all happy that she was off
honeymooning at "Reggae Sunsplash," but we wished she could
be with us.

"I don't regret it" Susan says now. "It was really important for
me to sit one out-very liberating. It left me the time to put all my
attention on my wedding and trip to Jamaica, while the rest of the
gang was shooting. Of course I had no way of knowing that the
two-hour TV movie would last longer than my entire first marriage!"

The rest of us managed to stay on pretty good terms as we
muddled through the two-hour Yuletide melodrama. We smiled as
the Bradys reunited for the holidays, smiled through subplots that
found Marcia's husband, Wally, out of work, Bobby dropping out
of college to become a race-car driver, and Jan, Philip, Alice and
Sam the Butcher contemplating divorce. We even did out best to
be convincing when our heartfelt rendition of "0 Come All Ye Faithful" miraculously saved Mike Brady from a construction-site
cave-in.

In true Brady fashion, the day shooting wrapped, we all got
together with Susan for dinner near the studio. She was glowing
with her Jamaican suntan as we shared stories of the shoot. In
turn, Susan told us of her escapades on the island of fun and sun.
For the first time in years, the Brady Six was out on the town.

Of course, everyone was glowing when the overnight ratings
showed up and we realized that A Very Brady Christmas had been
the recipient of its own Christmas miracle: MASSIVE Nielsen numbers. In fact, even capitalizing the word "massive" doesn't do our
ratings justice. We'd scored a 39 share, which (translated into
English) means that 39 percent of all the televisions turned on in
America were tuned in to the Brady's holiday heartwarmer.

Paramount was stunned, and ecstatically shaking its head over
the unshakable, unbreakable Brady following. Sherwood too was
thrilled, and within weeks those two entities were meeting and
hashing out a plan to once again make "The Brady Bunch" an
ongoing enterprise.

I his will take some explaining.

You already know that A Very Brady Christmas ran amok
through the Nielsens, pummeling the competition. CBS knew
it too, and with that knowledge, their desire for more Brady
product probably seems not only understandable but logical as well.

That's important, because it marks perhaps the one "logical"
thought in the entire lifespan of the atrocious unnatural disaster
that would come to be known as "The Bradys."

Still basking in the afterglow of their TV movie megabit,
Sherwood Schwartz and CBS became chummy and began toying
with the idea of doing three more two-hour TV movies. A plan was
hatched wherein the first film would deal with Bobby's auto racing
career, his crash, his subsequent injuries, his rehabilitation, and his
wedding. As an extra added ratings ploy, it was set to air in May
during the week of the Indianapolis 500. The second film would
deal with Mike Brady's budding political career and would in air
November during election week.

All sides agreed that they'd come up with a pretty rational plan;
but when CBS got greedy, that rational plan got tossed out the
window. Y'see, the brain trust at the network reasoned that if
doing three Brady movies was a good idea, then doing a sixepisode series would be twice as good.

It wasn't, and from here on in, the latest Brady reunion began
a slow, painful process of self-destruction. Leading off the lineup
of destruction was CBS's unshakable belief that "The Bradys"
which was at least intended to be a dramatic and adult-oriented
sequel series to "The Brady Bunch," could best serve the network's needs by manning our old comfortable Friday-night-ateight time slot (traditionally been dominated by kid-oriented
shows with very young demographics).

"The Bradys."
(©1990
Paramount
Pictures)

Over time, "The Bradys" would spark a veritable avalanche of heated confrontations, but the time-slot issue would bear the dubious distinction of igniting the inaugural one. The opponents in this preliminary bout were Sherwood Schwartz and the entire programming
department at CBS. Sherwood remembers it this way:

"They insisted that we go on at eight o'clock, and I said, `It's absolutely gonna fail at eight o'clock. It'll succeed at nine, but it can't
possibly succeed at eight.' And that was simply because it's now
1990, and the people who love these characters and who grew up
with these characters aren't out there at eight o'clock anymore.
They're grown-ups-nine o'clock and even ten o'clock viewers now.
I mean, I practically begged, `Put us on at ten, I don't care, but just
don't stick us with that eight o'clock slot."'

But they did, reasoning with typically tunnel-visioned insight,
"Our problems are not at nine and ten, our problems are at eight `Full House' is killing us." That really aggravated the normally
unflappable Mr. Sherwood Schwartz: "I yelled at them, `We can't
fight against "Full House," because that's exactly what we used to
be.' They were dead wrong, but wouldn't budge. All you had to do
was look at the ratings for that special two-hour premiere episode.
From eight to nine it got beaten up in the ratings, but from nine to
ten it clobbered everything! We were in the wrong time slot, and
obviously so."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, it will suffice to say that
an egregiously inappropriate time slot would cause "The Bradys" to
be born with one strike already against it.

Strike two followed almost immediately, but this time the problems had nothing to do with scheduling and everything to do with
the creative quality of the show. Basically, the Schwartzes sold the
show to CBS, and to all of us, as a "continuing adult drama." They'd
even nicknamed the project "Bradysomething," hoping to drive
home the fact that they'd be striving for solid, believable, real-life
story lines that would propel the Brady characters into the 1990s
and even smudge their squeaky-clean image a bit.

But somehow that just never happened, and it left all of us a bit
bewildered, and more than a bit disappointed. The most vocally dissatisfied among us (not surprisingly) was Robert Reed. He was quite
simply appalled by the scripts, story lines, and direction of "The
Bradys" and makes no bones about expressing his dissatisfaction:

"They failed to recognize that time has passed, times have
changed, tastes have changed, we're older, and you just can't write
the same old show. But here again Sherwood talks a great sociological notion. `We'll bring them up to date. We'll bring in modem problems. We'll deal with issues like paraplegia and alcoholism.' And
again I made the mistake of thinking, `Yeah, that sounds pretty
good. Why not?' and I asked Sherwood, `You're not gonna just make
the issues episodic, and have somebody paraplegic or alcoholic in
one episode, and cured in the next, right?' `Oh, no,' he said. `We're
gonna carry it on.'

"Sure we did. Marcia became alcoholic in two or three days and
was busy preaching the Twelve Steps in less than a week. Again it
was horse shit. But Sherwood doesn't recognize that."

So, like Godzilla and Mothra, Robert Reed and the Schwartzes
had spent years apart from one another only to rise up and battle it
out once more. Their disdain for one another was unmistakable,
and even the notion of keeping up appearances went out the window. This time around, there were no rules, no disqualifications,
and no holds barred.

Reed threw the first punch by going over Sherwood's head and
taking his gripes to the programming executives at Paramount. Robert explains:

"Look, nothing on God's green earth could have saved that
show," he said. "I know that from the other side now, from the network and studio's point of view. In dollars and cents, Paramount
took it up the ass in order to produce the series. They were losing
five hundred thousand dollars an episode, so they were really
pulling for this show to catch on. But then they discovered right
away, and I was bellowing this to them, that they couldn't let
Sherwood write this show or it would end up in the dirt. And when
that finally dawned on them, they couldn't get anyone else to write
it. Nobody would take the job. Nobody would go in there with
Sherwood executive-producing and calling the shots-nobody that
was good, anyway. And if you just go out and hire some lumber to
do it, Sherwood's gonna dominate them anyway. The whole point
was to get somebody in there who had good credits, and a credible
line on the show.

"And then the studio's theory became 'We'll go through the
first six, and then, whether Sherwood likes it or not, he's out. Not
out entirely, but there'll be somebody else in there executive-producing, and somebody else in there to write.' And I kept saying,
`You're gonna lose this show before we get there. It won't last that
long-you've got to do it now.'

"But the network was all in transition at the time. They knew
[Jeff] Sagansky was coming in [as CBS's new president], and you
couldn't get a straight answer from anybody because they were all
afraid for their jobs. I'd send notes over there, but nobody would
do anything. I think that's what killed the show."

Maybe. But I personally feel that the real problem with "The
Bradys" wasn't so much its cliched scripts and story lines as it was a
complete lack of focus. I mean, whereas "The Brady Bunch" was
always a series about a mom, a dad, and their kids, "The Bradys"
multiplied that cast of characters exponentially by saddling almost
every original character with a spouse, kids, problems, and story
lines exclusively their own, That made for a cast of characters so
complicated and story lines so confusing that it became nearly
impossible to keep track of the action without a scorecard. Each
episode of "The Bradys" revolved around the trials and tribulations
of Marcia, Wally and their kids, Jessica and Mickey; Greg, his wife,
Nora, and nerdy son, Kevin; Jan, hubby Philip, and their adopted
Korean daughter, Patty; Bobby and his extra-perky wife, Tracey
(played by extra-perky MTV veejay Martha Quinn); Peter and his
fiancee, Valerie; Cindy and her boyfriend, Gary; Mike and Carol; and,
of course, Alice ... Whew! That's nineteen major characters. Maybe
numbered uniforms would have helped keep things straight.