Day by Day

I haven't actually seen the show since the 80's but I LOVED it. I remember Ross, the teenage boy, always wore a blue robe around the house. My favorite episode is the one where he watches the Brady Bunch marathon on tv and falls asleep, dreaming he is a Brady kid. I'd love to see this show in reruns.

I remember watching it when it came on in the late 80s when I was about 10, and saw re-runs on tv land in the fall of 1999. The show is not really funny at all, except for the scenes with the hard career driven overbearing business woman who is ruthless, obnoxious yet funny. She looks pretty damn good. ANyway the occasional appearance from the oldest son is somewhat amusing. My favortie episode is the one where Eileen goes back to her highschool re-union and takes the kid from the brady bunch with her as her date. There, she dances look a crazy fool that she is, and ditches her date at the ball to be with a guy she had a crush on in highschool, only to break her date's feelings. And from my recollection, queen elizabeth is portrayed. Don't remember the details too much of da show but its funny. Too bad they dont show rereuns....

Hard-working stockbroker Brian and lawyer Kate felt like they'd missed out on teenage son Ross's childhood, so when baby daughter Emily came along, they decided to stay home and open a daycare center. This transition was especially hard on slacker Ross, who'd become accustomed to having the house to himself. Working at the Harper Preschool was sweet college-student Kristin, the object of Ross's unwanted affections, who was majoring in psychology and minoring in weaving. And a constant fixture in their home was self-centered Eileen, Kate's best friend and Brian's former coworker, who eventually bought the house next door. A group of kids regularly appeared in the daycare center, but the only standouts were brainiac Molly and rascally Justin, both of whom were quick with the one-liners. Also frequently seen were Ross's buddies Stiv (formerly known as Steve), dimwitted Bob, dorky J.D. and pretentious Allison, whom Ross dated late in the series.

Created by Gary David Goldberg and future political comedy writer Andy Borowitz and featuring a lot of the same crew from "Family Ties," the show initially had a similar vibe in it's first run as a midseason replacement. Then a writer's strike stretched through the summer, which delayed the fall season and turned viewers away from network TV in droves. When the show finally returned for season 2, the cast really began to mesh and the tone got lighter (more akin to "Growing Pains"), with the hilarious "Brady Bunch" episode that's mentioned in every other review, fantasy sequences and other zaniness. Personally, I liked the second season better and was sad that there weren't more. After the show's cancellation, Lifetime aired reruns for a while and they popped up on TV Land around the turn of the century.

Aside from the bizarre "Brady Bunch" connection, the other most memorable component of this series was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who shined brightly as the total narcissist that hated children. Most of the laugh-out-loud funny jokes were spewed from her lips. It' also interesting to see then-novice, now-old-pro Courtney Thorne Smith learning the ropes of sitcoms. She was a little flat in the beginning but had improved by leaps and bounds by the end of the series. I could go on about each of the actors, but suffice it to say that they were each great in their own rite.

Paramount's not good about releasing their shows on DVD, but I hope they'll license it to Shout Factory or some other distributor someday. This was a funny, lovable little show and it's sad that it's kind of been forgotten.

I read about this series in an article on Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and tracked down a couple of episodes on youtube. The first one I found was the "Brady Bunch" episode, mentioned in most of the IMDB user reviews. It was pretty cute, as a slacker kid gets to life love as a Brady surrounded by BB's original cast. Not amazing, but cute.

Then I found the first episode, which was quite mediocre. The cast is a pretty well-known group, but both episodes focus primarily on an unappealing teenage boy. Louis-Dreyfuss shows up now and again and is amusing, but she's a peripheral character.

This is like a million forgettable sitcoms from the 80s.

The most memorable episode of this show, in my humble opinion, was that in which Ross dreamed that he was in the Brady dimension in which he and his Brady brethren were doomed to fix bikes and comment that things were neat-o. Not only was it a funny episode but obviously caught the eye of the producers of the Brady Bunch Movies insofar as Christopher Daniel Barnes, the actor who played Ross on 'Day By Day', was cast as Greg Brady in the aforementioned movies. Although most of this actor's work has resulted in little critical acclaim, I have somehow followed his career quite closely having been a fan of 'Starman', 'Day By Day' and of course, the Brady Movies in which Ben Stiller's wife stole the show as Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!