The Mind-Bogglingly Surreal, Ill-Conceived Brady Bunch Variety Hour Is So Much More than the Inspiration for a Classic Simpsons Segment

People know The Brady Bunch Hour largely, if not exclusively, through The Simpsons’ ingenious parody of it as “The Simpsons Family Smile Time Variety Hour” on the classic eighth season episode “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase.”

It’s a parody of spin-offs and abysmal, tacky variety shows (which is to say, variety shows) in general but it is very specifically a pitch-perfect, devastatingly funny parody of one absurdly tacky, abysmal variety show in particular: The Brady Bunch Hour, the Krofft brothers’ bizarre, notorious attempt to reinvent America’s favorite blandly idealized blended family as unlikely vaudevillians. 

“The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase” host Troy McClure, who would have felt right at home on The Brady Bunch Hour pitches the variety show as an opportunity for the Simpsons “to show off the full range of their talents”, however, “one family member didn’t want that chance” but thanks to some creative casting, you won’t even notice her absence. 

In “The Simpsons Smile Time Variety Hour” the lone holdout is predictably and realistically Lisa Simpson, who understandably would have seen the variety show as beneath her dignity, and, indeed, beneath the dignity of anyone who possesses dignity to begin with. In The Brady Bunch Hour the Brady Bunch veteran who is conspicuous in her absence is Eve Plumb, AKA the Real Jan.  

Plumb might not have been the most popular or important Brady Kid but when she opted out of returning, not wanting to commit to either 13 episodes or a five year option for more shows, she instantly became not just an important cast member but the most important Brady kid because her absence completely invalidated an already surreally misguided, ill-conceived project.

Making a Brady Bunch variety show without Eve Plumb would be like making a Beatles variety show with a new, slightly revamped line-up of John, Paul, George and Freddie Joe. It wouldn’t matter how talented a drummer Freddie Joe might be. It wouldn’t even matter if he was a better drummer than Ringo. No, all that would matter is that Freddie Joe is not the drummer of the Beatles, a very famous group with a very well-known lineup, and consequently super-fans overjoyed at the Fab Four’s return would never accept him as anything other than a Fake Ringo whose presence alone transforms a potentially satisfying reunion into a deeply unsatisfying almost-reunion. 

Under no circumstances could The Brady Bunch Hour have worked. At the risk of being hyperbolic, making the Bradys into variety show hoofers is arguably the single stupidest idea in the history of the universe. But replacing Eve Plumb with newcomer Geri Reischl in the role of Jan truly represents the maraschino cherry placed gingerly atop this three scoop shit sundae that is The Brady Bunch Hour

The Brady Bunch Hour was so fascinatingly wrong that The Simpsons’ spoof can’t possibly capture all of its egregiously bonkers elements.

The set for “The Simpsons Family Smile Time Variety Hour” is tacky and vulgar but it noticeably  lacks the defining feature of The Brady Bunch Hour’s set: an enormous pool where a dance troupe known as the Krofftettes performed water ballet and soggy slapstick shenanigans. The Kroffts were inspired by their own Donnie and Marie, which prominently featured an ice skating ring because its stars were accomplished skaters on top of everything else. 

It’s much less clear why there’s a fucking pool in the Brady Bunch Hour set.

When pondering individual choices and the series as a whole it is important to remember that drug use was prevalent in show business in the 1970s, particularly on the set of The Brady Bunch Hour, which was blindingly white both in the sense of being perhaps the most Caucasian endeavor ever and also in being fueled by rampant cocaine use that gave the cast and crew confidence in their terrible decisions and atrocious judgment.

The underwater clowning and dance has so little to do with the rest of the show that it would make as much, and as little, sense to break up the excruciating comedy and dire music and empty spectacle with yo-yo tricks, a black belt breaking cement blocks with his fists or a man in a bear suit solemnly reciting hymns. 

The Brady Bunch Hour opens on a note of deliberate, delirious excess, with a frenzy of Busby Berkley-style choreography and elaborate camerawork showcasing the frenetic exertions of chorus girls all sporting the same plastic amphetamine smiles as they gyrate in unison onstage and in the water. 

On a giant screen behind the Bradys we see rapid-fire images of the cast in their Brady Bunch days with the exceedingly notable exception of Geri Reischl, whose presence once agin serves to highlight the perversely off-brand nature of this unintentionally hilarious attempt at brand extension. 

The old-school spectacle is designed to distract from the sorry nature of the main attraction. On stage the Bradys, and Geri Reischl, perform a Branson-style medley that combines the old-time standard “Babyface” with the hot new disco smash of the moment: “Love to Love You Baby.”

An urban legend quickly developed around “Love to Love You Baby” that Donna Summer’s cries of sexual ecstasy on the song weren’t feigned at all but rather the product of genuine masturbation and that what you’re hearing on the iconic, controversial disco classic are the sounds of real orgasms from a woman in the throes of unimaginable sensual bliss. 

Despite its title, “Love to Love You Baby” is most assuredly not a song about romance. It’s not about love. It’s a song about Olympics-level fucking, about orgasmic delight and female sexual pleasure and pushing the boundaries of explicitness and sexuality to their breaking point and beyond. 

It is, in other words, an amazingly perverse choice for a family group so bland and wholesome that their name doubles as dismissive shorthand for “white-bread” to sing as an introductory number.

I should note that when the Bradys perform “Love to Love You Baby” they do not follow in Summer’s footsteps and try to create the impression that they are experiencing powerful, even overpowering orgasms while in the physical process of singing the song. 

Robert Reed does not, for example, attempt to create the impression that while moonlighting architect Mike Brady is singing this song next to his wife and seven of his children his body is being wracked by almost painful sexual pleasure as he experiences one powerful orgasm after another, separately and collectively reducing him to a quivering pile of sexual satisfaction. 

It does, however, seem a little weird and a little wrong that the entire family immediately starts smoking the second the song is over. 

Watching the Bradys destroy the Great American Songbook in medley after medley I came to a realization about “Weird Al” Yankovic’s possible motivation for polka medleys. You could not watch television in the 1970s without being inundated by medleys of standards and contemporary hits and clamorous ditties that weren’t just bad: they were an insult to music. 

I felt sorry for the songs being performed here. They were good songs, great often. They did nothing to merit being inelegantly shoe-horned into the Bradys muddled post-Brady Bunch legacy in a sad attempt to keep these sentient slabs of soggy white-bread on the air at any cost. 

Having written exhaustively about his entire discography, I know as well as anyone just how inspired and creative Al’s polka medleys are. They have to be or people have gotten tired of them a long time ago. Yet I’m not sure anything in any of his polka medleys has ever been as perverse or comically incongruous as Mike Brady, architect with pipes of rusty aluminum, and now not-so-little little Cindy Brady peppily crooning an infamous volcanic explosion of aggressive female sexual orgasmic ecstasy like “Love To Love You Baby” as a peppy early number of their own ill-fated variety show.  

The classically trained Reed, who was nominated for three Emmys for his non-Brady work, famously hated the show and role that made him famous. He rightly considered it insipid pabulum and continually bumped heads over the direction of the show. Reed wanted it to be less terrible. Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz was very comfortable operating at the existing level of shittiness or possibly getting even worse. 

Yet Reed apparently enjoyed The Brady Bunch Hour despite its mind-boggling, almost inconceivable awfulness, because it gave him a chance to sing and dance, to express an element of his personality he repressed as a closeted homosexual Thespian who took himself very seriously and had the credits (The Defenders, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Roots) and background (Northwestern, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Actors Studio) to back up his perception of himself as an artist. 

Yes, Reed understandably and rightly thought mechanically delivering pat life lessons and canned wisecracks on The Brady Bunch was beneath his dignity but singing and dancing to “Shake Your Booty” in a sparkly white tuxedo surrounded by his coked-out fake kids in front of a pool was somehow just his speed. 

If you wanted to be obscenely, unnecessarily, incorrectly generous you could call The Brady Bunch Hour revolutionary in its format in that it was a variety show but it also incorporated elements of seemingly every television genre other than the western, including sitcom, soap opera, melodrama, sketch, broad physical comedy, nightmarish puppetry (this is a Krofft Brothers production, after all), song, dance, musicals, post-modern motherfuckery, conceptual weirdness and, most importantly, underwater ballet. 

You gotta have underwater ballet to be successful in television. Name one hit show without it! You can’t! 

I’m laughing already!

Even though The Brady Bunch Hour was a variety show it maintained a heavy element of narrative storytelling. Within the universe of the show Mike Brady has quit his job as an architect to pursue his musical family’s dream of having a national televised showcase for their show-business ambitions. 

Reed’s inexperience as a singer and dancer was written into the show. The Brady Bunch Hour made a running gag of Brady being a show-business novice easily out-performed by his wife and kids. Henderson was a a veteran singer while the Brady Kids recorded albums and toured during the show’s run.

Reed’s inability to sing or dance posed a formidable problem to a show that’s mostly singing and dancing, with a healthy side order of baggy pants comical shenanigans but there’s something poignant and endearing about Reed’s doomed, Quixotic efforts to keep up, to will himself into being a competent singer and adequate hoofer. Maybe it’s just my aesthetic, but it’s so much more interesting watching someone like Reed try and fail at music than someone who is good enough but generic. 

It makes no sense for Mike Brady, vocally challenged architect, to be at the center of this mostly singing, mostly dancing kitsch extravaganza flaunting his glaring limitations as a musical showman. The clammy, desperate addition of the Bradys’ maid Alice is even more inexplicable, bordering on surreal. 

After starring in The Brady Bunch, Davis understandably felt the need to repent. She renounced her sinful show-business ways and retired from the business to serve Christ. 

But her resolve crumbled when she was afforded a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do the worst work of her career in a project so misconceived that later generations would legitimately wonder how it could have come to pass. The answer, as with the case of the Star Wars Holiday Special and The Paul Lynde Halloween Special is cocaine, Bruce Vilanch, and everyone involved snorting Bruce Vilanch’s weight in cocaine every week to get into the appropriate state of mind. 

How could Davis resist the opportunity to dress up like a nightmarish hillbilly geriatric Pippi Longstocking and hoof her way through a clattering cover of “Thank God I’m a Country Girl” surrounded by rednecks with grotesque puppet heads that, like so much in this beautiful disaster, are pure nightmare fuel? 

As a woman of faith and devout prude, Davis understandably clashed with her onscreen love interest, Rip Taylor, who was brought in after the pilot to add a missing element of comedy and steals the show as Mr. Merill, a charlatan who pops up in every episode, often working a new, wildly inappropriate new job/side-hustle. He’s a decidedly Lionel Hutz-like figure who is pulled like a magnet to the sleazy, the sordid, the patently disreputable. 

Watching The Brady Bunch Hour I came to understand why Saturday Night Live has been lionized and romanticized as revolutionary, important, countercultural comedy when it is so obviously, even transparently commercial and mainstream, a towering monument to cynical calculation and comedic cowardice. 

Compared to the variety shows that flooded the air at the time, including, but not limited to Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, Saturday Night Live was punk as fuck. It was Lenny Bruce-post arrest. It was hailed as subversive and brilliant in no small part because Krofft Brothers-produced, Bruce Vilanch-written variety shows set the bar so low for sketch comedy that Saturday Night Live couldn’t help but soar over it. 

The Brady Bunch Hour unsuccessfully tried to re-sell the Bradys back to the public an off-brand Partridge Family crossed with Donnie and Marie, who cameo in the Brady Bunch Hour pilot as mandated in the Donnie and Marie Variety Act of 1975, which dictated that the God-loving, toothy twosome lend their talents to every variety show and special in existence. Y’all probably didn’t recognize them in Star Wars Holiday Special because they took turns playing Chewbacca. 

By the time the Bradys’ new neighbors Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett, then the hottest TV stars in the world and consequently peers and colleagues to the fucking BRADY BUNCH, show up for a spontaneous sleepover because of a termite infestation in their house the mission drift was impossible to ignore.  

A show that began as a look at a blandly idealized, blended All-American family had become a glitter-strewn, puppet-infested, inexplicably Esther Williams-like variety spectacle about a show-business family that hung out with the biggest celebrities in the world and contended with romantic competition from Charo and Paul Williams. 

The core joke of first the influential stage show The Real Live Brady Bunch, where future stars like Jane Lynch and Andy Richter performed actual Brady Bunch scripts live for the ironic amusement of Gen-Xers in the early 1990s, and then the Brady Bunch movies is that the “normalcy” of the Brady Bunch is, in fact, anything but normal. 

What The Brady Bunch tried to pass off as sunny Americana was actually utterly bizarre. Plop the Bradys into an approximation of the real world, as The Brady Bunch Movie did, and they seem more like space aliens than a typical American family. 

The Brady Bunch Hour took the insane fake-normalcy of The Brady Bunch and multiplied it by the coked-out insanity of the variety show to create something that so wrong that decades later we’re still trying to figure out the mystery of how something like this could haver happened. Beyond cocaine, of course. 

The Brady Bunch Hour was kind enough to let audiences know when they’d made it to the second half of the show. This rewarded their resilience and persistence in powering through “entertainment” that functioned more as a tacky endurance test by letting them know that the end was in sight, and even though it felt like every episode lasted years, there was actually only a half hour left. 

The Brady Bunch Hour lives up to the hype as the worst of the worst. It’s one of the most staggeringly ill-conceived and poorly executed ideas in the history of television, and today occupies the same place of shame/morbid fascination that its close cousin the Star Wars Holiday Special does in its own universe. It’s the Bradys’ Kiss Meet the Phantom of the Park, a show  that still feels like a fever dream even after you’ve consumed all nine episodes. 

Due to music rights clearance issues and a screaming lack of interest, there will probably never be an official release of The Brady Bunch Hour. But I have seen it, and can vouch that it exists, improbably, wrongly, but incontrovertibly. Now you can experience it for yourself and see firsthand that sometimes the reality is even crazier than the legend. 

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