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.

The cast of The Brady Bunch.

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...