[This week marks the 60th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]
On how the iconic sitcom avoided controversy, how it got closer to the line, and a secret third thing.
The Brady Bunch only aired for five seasons, from September 1969 through March 1974, which boggles my mind when I think about how often I watched its reruns as a kid (and, yes, how large its shadow looms in the TV world as well as our broader cultural consciousness). But I can’t imagine a more fraught social and political moment in which those five seasons could have been located, from the deepening Vietnam War and its protests to almost the entire unfolding of the Watergate scandal (Nixon resigned just five months after the show’s run ended). And while of course a sitcom wouldn’t necessarily dive deep into those kinds of issues, it’s pretty striking how fully The Brady Bunch avoided even the barest whisper of them. For example, oldest child Greg (Barry Williams) was certainly of the age where he would have been thinking about the war and the draft, but such questions were never mentioned; nor, for another example, did any of the show’s strong female characters (no, not even Alice) ever refer in any direct way to the second-wave feminist movement. Its rough contemporary All in the Family (1971-1979) The Brady Bunch was definitely not.
There are different ways to push the envelope, though, and while the Bradys didn’t generally do so through overt plotlines or dialogue, that doesn’t mean that the show wasn’t without its controversial elements. One of them was controversial enough that it never got overtly mentioned: while Mike Brady (Robert Reed) was a widower, Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) was intended to be divorced, and the subject was still taboo enough that her first husband was simply never mentioned at all. But another controversial element was present on screen in many of the episodes: the fact that Mike and Carol shared a bed, and were frequently depicted talking about the show’s events while getting ready to go to sleep in that single bed. This wasn’t the first TV couple to do so, but it was without question the most prominent such early instance, and I’d say that specific detail reminds us that the show’s overall premise, its presentation and exploration of the challenges and joys of a blended family, was itself at least a bit controversial (or at least unusual) and worth celebrating.
And then there’s what was unfolding behind the scenes for the show’s actors. In that hyperlinked post I highlighted what we’ve learned in the 50 years since the show ended about Robert Reed’s closeted sexuality, his eventual tragic death from AIDS, and most relevantly to this post, what those layers to his identity meant about his experience making this particular show. I quoted in that post and will quote again here Florence Henderson’s thoughtful perspective: “Here he was, the perfect father of this wonderful little family, a perfect husband…He was an unhappy person…I think had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration.” There shouldn’t be anything controversial about an actor’s sexuality, but the fact that there would have been had Reed been honest about his identity reflects the limits of even the most progressive portrayals of family on 1960s and 70s TV.
Crowd-sourced post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?
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