The Brady Brides

I must be one of the few people who really liked The Brady Brides. It deserved at least three or four seasons, and shame on it being cancelled way too soon. Why oh why? Anyway, maybe The Brady Brides can be rebooted with a LGBTI twist for these contemporary times.

I recall the Family Channel airing The Brady Brides during the Thanksgiving season in 1997. The mediocrity of this 1981 revival was evident, and it's no surprise that the series was axed after just two months on the air. TV revivals in general are often inferior, and The Brady Brides was no exception. Nonetheless, I found it to be only slightly more watchable than the sorry one-hour dramedy that followed in 1990 ("The Bradys").

This short-lived spinoff from the 1981 TV movie The Brady Girls Get Married only lasted 7 episodes. The series tried way too hard to cash in on the more successful Three's Company with more adult-oriented humor and was taped in front of a live studio audience. The only good episode was when the couples appeared as contestants on The Newlywed Game and discover how very little they know about their marriages.

If you look at this show, it can be seen as the middle part of a trilogy (that is if you don't count the cartoon series and the horrid variety show). This show along with the original "Brady Bunch" and the hour long drama "The Bradys" make up the trilogy. Unfortunately, no one wanted to see a show with just Marcia, Jan, Carol and Alice (neither Robert Reed nor any of the Brady Boys or even Cindy appeared on this show). It was a bad idea then and it was just another attempt to squeeze a little more out of the family that wouldn't die.

People heap a lot of scorn on anything Brady, but it's undeserved. The original show taught me about as much about human relations as Gilligan's Island. Brady Brides -- and all the subsequent attempts to revive the Zombie Brady -- have always seemed like trips home for me.

It was almost pathologically unfunny. Just like the original. But how could you not love it? Marcia and Jan looked fantastic -- in fact, I think they could've saved the show if it was titled 'the Brady Strippers.'

When it first came out, everyone in my class loved it. We had puppet shows when I was in grade six. Two of them were Brady Bride puppet shows. I was in neither, despite my hand's striking resemblance to Wally - very hairy and meaty.