The Brady Brides

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.

The fantasy lives on as we watch the Brady girls overact and over cute themselves.

The limited run was obviously due only to our fascination with Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb

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.

I thought this show really deserved more of a chance. Marcia and Jan are both newly married and are house-hunting. They quickly realize that they only way they can afford a nice house in California is to pool their resources and buy a house together.

The comedy comes from the fact that the man Marcia married is an easygoing slob, while Jan's husband is an uptight, neat-freak professor. Sound familiar? If Neil Simon did not demand royalties, it was only because the show disappeared so quickly.

Another appeal for me as a young man was that Eve Plumb had grown up to be a total babe. Despite her role as the awkward middle child on "The Brady Bunch", she played a self-assured young woman whose beauty completely outshone that of Maureen McCormick (who was still very attractive).

Perhaps this show would have done better without the Brady connection. Brady fans were probably disappointed that the show featured only two of the Brady family, while those who scorned "The Brady Bunch" never gave it a chance.

My rating of seven (one for each aired episode) may be higher that the show actually deserves, but I give credit for the potential of a show that never really got a chance to find itself