When the The Brady Bunch Cast Reunited One Last Time for ‘The Brady Brides’

Here’s the story / Of a short-lived sitcom / That featured two very familiar-looking girls / With their husbands, they lived together / Until NBC gave the show a hurl.

One of the numerous short-lived attempts to recapture the success of The Brady Bunch, The Brady Brides, debuted on NBC 45 years ago, on February 6, 1981. It was a TV movie and backdoor pilot that turned into a miniseries that turned into a full-fledged series that turned into a footnote in Brady Bunch history. Here’s how it played out…

The Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz credits his son with the idea

(c) Paramount Television/ Courtesy: Everett Collection.

As Sherwood Schwartz explained to the Associated Press at the time, The Brady Brides started out as a sitcom idea called Full House (no relation to the 1987 sitcom) that he tried to sell for six years. Full House’s premise had two young couples pooling their resources to buy a house, and Sherwood’s son Lloyd convinced him to apply that premise to a Brady Bunch reunion.

“He said, ‘Why don’t we make the two girls who get married the two oldest Brady girls? Same show, but now you have the power of the old series behind you,’” Sherwood recalled. “So, in a sense, we gave the network what they wanted, a show with a built-in audience, and they gave us what we wanted.”

And so Sherwood and Lloyd centered the plot of the TV reunion around Marcia (Maureen McCormick) and Jan (Eve Plumb) getting married and moving into one house with their respective husbands, Wally (Jerry Houser) and Philip (Ron Kuhlman).

Sherwood also insisted that the original Brady house be reconstructed, even though the $200,000 price tag ate up much of the show’s budget. “The house is a character,” he reasoned. “Kids remember every room in the house. I wouldn’t do it without that house. … I said, ‘There’s no way I can put these people in different house.’ They said, ‘People move.’ I said, ‘Not the Bradys.’”

Paramount paid big bucks to get all the Bradys back

©Paramount Television/courtesy Everett Collection

The Brady Brides marked the final onscreen appearance of the complete Brady Bunch cast… and the reunion almost didn’t happen. In his memoir Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Barry Williams said he balked at the project when his agent called to say the Schwartzes had written the TV movie and Paramount wanted to shoot it. “I don’t think he’d even half-finished his sentence before I cut him off with a firm ‘Forget it!’” Williams wrote.

As Williams explained, the young actors behind the Brady kids had spent years trying to escape the typecasting and relative un-coolness of their Brady Bunch fame. “Almost unanimously, we chose to sever our ties with the Bunch. But when Paramount got ‘persuasive’ ($$$), every one of us caved in and re-enlisted,” he confessed. “All nine of us were ready to do the big-happy-family thing one more time. … The lights came on, the cameras rolled, Bob Reed grumbled about the lousy script… it was just like old times.”

NBC almost ended the production with the onscreen wedding

A week before the reunion’s premiere came the news that NBC had decided to turn what was then a TV movie into a series, but not without some internal debate. “The whole situation is very strange,” Sherwood told Hollywood columnist Marilyn Beck at the time.

As Sherwood explained, The Brady Brides was shot as a two-hour movie. Jan and Eve would get married in the first 90 minutes and then move into their shared house with their husbands in the last half-hour, which would be a pilot for a continuing series.

“Well, last week NBC called and said to trim it to 90 minutes and end with the wedding scene,” Sherwood said. “So we rushed back and re-edited it and that was that.”

But then NBC had another change of heart and ordered Sherwood to split the 90-minute film into three 30-minute parts and start production on six to eight more half-hour episodes, he said.

So the TV movie The Brady Girls Get Married aired miniseries-style from February 6 to February 20, 1981, and the rest of The Brady Brides’ first and only season kicked off on March 6 of that year.

One critic called The Brady Brides “about as devious a ploy as I’ve ever seen perpetuated on commercial television.”

Everett Collection

TV critic Robin Engel panned The Brady Brides. “That this Barbie doll of a show should be laid on an unsuspecting public as prime time entertainment is about as devious a ploy as I’ve ever seen perpetuated on commercial television,” Engel wrote. “Plodding humor, plastic characters, and Popsicle plots make this one show I can do without.”

Viewers also didn’t warm to the series. “The show’s writing was weak,” one recalled in a Reddit post last year. “The acting was meh (not for everyone, but I don’t want to single out any specific actor). It was really corny of a show but at the same time maybe a guilty pleasure for a hardcore Brady fan.”

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on whom you ask, The Brady Brides didn’t last long. As Williams observed in his memoir, the show “live[d] thirteen weeks before succumbing to bombitis.”