The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch was one of the last domestic situation comedies which populated television during the 1950s and 1960s. While it flew below Nielsen radar in its original run, its popularity in syndication led to frequent reincarnations through the 1990s. Generation X viewers treated the series with a combination of irony and reverence.
In 1966, Gilligan's Island executive producer Sherwood Schwartz read a newspaper item stating that 30 percent of American families were stepfamilies—where one or both parents were bringing into a second marriage children from a first marriage ended by death or divorce. Schwartz quickly realized that while TV sitcoms either featured traditional, two-parent families (Make Room for Daddy, Leave it to Beaver) or families headed by a widow or widower (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, My Three Sons), no comedy had yet focused on a merging of two families. He spent the next three years developing a series based on this premise. By the time The Brady Bunch debuted in the fall of 1969, Hollywood had explored the subject with two boxoffice hits, With Six You Get Eggroll and Yours, Mine, and Ours (Schwartz planned to call his sitcom Yours and Mine).
The simple theme song laid out the storyline: Mike Brady (played by Robert Reed), a widower architect with three sons—Greg, Peter, and Bobby—met and wed Carol (Florence Henderson), a single mother with three blonde daughters—Marcia, Jan, and Cindy.
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