By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1988 festive season reunion telemovie classic A Very Brady Christmas.
It’s Christmas in July, so it’s officially the second-best time of the year to take a look back at 1988’s A Very Brady Christmas, the second in a series of follow-up projects to the beloved American TV sitcom The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 through to 1974, and then played seemingly non-stop in syndication for decades after. If you’re a little out of touch with vintage sitcoms, The Brady Bunch was famously the tale of a blended family (something of a first for the small screen) led by newlyweds Mike (Robert Reed) and Carol (Florence Henderson) Brady, who suddenly find themselves with a much bigger family, once their combined brood of kids – Mike’s boys Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight), and Bobby (Mike Lookinland), and Carol’s girls Marcia (Maureen McCormack), Jan (Eve Plumb), and Cindy (Susan Olsen) – are all under the one roof. Helping out, and providing comic relief, was erstwhile housekeeper Alice (Ann B. Davis).
A much-loved and utterly essential part of many childhoods across the world, The Brady Bunch got its first follow-up in 1981 with the short-lived The Brady Brides, a more mature offering which followed the eldest Brady girls, Marcia and Jan (again played by McCormack and Plumb), into married life. Generally poorly received by all comers, The Brady Brides was axed after just season, but by 1988, major network CBS thought it was time to revisit the world’s most iconic blended family and drafted in original creator and Brady Bunch main-man Sherwood Schwartz, along with his son and frequent collaborator Lloyd J. Schwartz, to put together a reunion telemovie. This was a time-honoured tradition for the TV movie format, with shows like Leave It To Beaver, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Waltons and The Andy Griffith Show already having received the belated telemovie follow-up treatment, often to great success. This Brady reunion, however, would have the added up-tick of a Christmas setting.
A shot of pure nostalgia, A Very Brady Christmas is a yuletide delight, jammed tight with all of the sentiment and goofy humour that The Brady Bunch was famous for, but with some decidedly 1980s trappings, and considerably more adult minded themes. Still living happily in the family home (which has had a hideous 1980s makeover, its seventies kitsch wonderland now a sea of beige and ugly soft furnishings), architect Mike and real estate agent Carol initially individually conspire to give each other a surprise vacation, but when that falls through, they opt instead to pay for all their kids to come home for the Christmas holidays. Rather than jumping at the chance (WTF? Who wouldn’t want to spend Christmas with The Brady Bunch??!!), most of the kids need a little convincing from their parents, but after a touch of gentle Mike-and-Carol cajoling, they all head home…bringing with them a big, bulging bag of secrets.
Where to begin? The always unlucky-in-love Alice has been cruelly deserted by husband Sam The Butcher for a younger woman! Marcia’s husband Wally (Jerry Houser, back from The Brady Brides) has lost his job, while Jan has just separated from her husband Phillip (Ron Kuhlman, also back from The Brady Brides). Peter is uncertain about whether he wants to marry his girlfriend Valerie (Carol Huston), who is also his boss, while obstetrician Greg turns up with his son because his selfish wife Nora (Caryn Richman) has opted to visit her family instead. Bobby has secretly dropped out of college to focus on becoming a race car driver, and Cindy would prefer to be on a ski trip with her friends from college than at home with her family for Christmas. Geez!
The biggest turn-up here, however, is that Cindy is played by ring-in Jennifer Runyon, who had previously appeared on the classic sitcom Charles In Charge. The “real” Cindy, Susan Olsen, chose to go on her honeymoon instead of appearing in the telemovie when she was offered less money than the other Brady kids to appear in the reunion. CBS only contractually required Paramount Television to deliver five of the kids for the telemovie to happen, so when everyone else said yes, youngest child Susan Olsen was low-balled in contract negotiations. Now, that’s the kind of behaviour that would have disgusted moral avatar and all-round-good-guy Mike Brady!
There is also a subplot involving architect Mike and real estate agent Carol’s dealings with dodgy builder Ted Roberts (Phillip R. Allen), whose cost-cutting methods on a project on which they are all involved will ultimately have a major part to play in the dramatic finale of A Very Brady Christmas, which hits a real high note when it makes a striking and wonderfully over-the-top call-back to one of the most well-loved festive episodes of the original series.
While there is much stuff in the grown-up world of A Very Brady Christmas that obviously never would have flown in the original Brady Bunch series (in one scene, Carol leaves Jan and Phillip alone to have make-up sex!), this decades-later follow-up still taps into those essential elements that made The Brady Bunch so cherished by so many. Though rocking a grey perm, moustache and hideous 1980s leisure-wear, Mike Brady is still the best TV father ever, leavening his wisdom with humour at every turn while quietly, sensitively making things right for his family. Carol is sweet but saucy (much more so here than in the original series), and nothing short of the perfect matriarch, while the kids are all well-devised adult versions of their strongly established childhood characters. The show’s trademark goofy, often-well-telegraphed brand of humour is well in place, while its regular themes (doing the right thing; supporting your family; being honest; talking about your problems rather than hiding them) get an airing too.
A Very Brady Christmas is not perfect (Marcia gets literally no storyline at all, instead sidelined by the hapless Wally’s constant whining and moaning; Jennifer Runyon is good, but, well, she’s just not really Cindy; Sam The Butcher is played by Lewis Arquette – the patriarch of the Arquette acting clan – rather than original actor Allan Melvin, who had retired from performing by the time of the telemovie; and there is not even one single mention made of the controversial figure of Cousin Oliver who, nevertheless, was for a brief period a member of the Brady household), but it’s a real seasonal joy, and still an absolute must for Brady Bunch fans.
A Very Brady Christmas was also the second highest rating TV programme on American television in 1988, and led to the production of the short-lived, ill-advised comeback drama series The Bradys, which saw, amongst other things, Mike enter local politics; Marcia (played by ring-in Leah Ayres rather than Maureen McCormack) develop a drinking problem; Jan and Phillip adopt a young girl from Korea; and Bobby in a wheelchair after a car racing accident! Whoa! For those childhood Brady Bunch fans for whom this heavily adult-oriented plotting is all a bit much, A Very Brady Christmas remains the last original Brady outing that feels truly connected stylistically to the much-loved series that started it all. If you grew up loving The Brady Bunch and you’re feeling like a little a mid-year Christmas cheer, A Very Brady Christmas is the telemovie bauble you need.
Availability: A Very Brady Christmas is included in the absolutely mammoth The Brady-est Brady Bunch TV & Movie Collection! Blu-ray set, which includes every Brady Bunch project (except for the notorious Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which was made by Sid & Marty Kroft and not Paramount Television) in its entirety, including the remake movie series with Shelley Long and Gary Cole.
If you enjoyed this review, check out our other vintage telemovies The Gladiator, Elvis, The Rat Pack, Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story, Terror Among Us, The Hanged Man, Hardcase, Charlie’s Angels: Angels In Vegas, Vanishing Point, To Heal A Nation, Fugitive Among Us, To Kill A Cop, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Police Story: A Chance To Live, Murder On Flight 502, Moon Of The Wolf, The Secret Night Caller, Cotton Candy, And The Band Played On, Gargoyles, Death Car On The Freeway, Short Walk To Daylight, Trapped, Hotline, Killdozer, The Jericho Mile, Mongo’s Back In Town, and Tribes.
