Day by Day: A Very Brady Episode

Day by Day: A Very Brady Episode
NBC
February 5, 1989
Sitcom
VHS
B

If anyone remembers this usually bland sort of spin-off of Family Ties it is for this very episode.  And I would've gone with a B+, but, ugh, the parents are boring!  (The mother, Kate was played by Linda Kelsey, who was Lt. Mickey Baker on M*A*S*H but may be best known for Lou Grant.)  No wonder son Ross (the eventually ironically cast Christopher Daniel Barnes, Greg Brady in the '90s big-screen parodies) wants to escape into The Brady Bunch.  Not that he's a very observant viewer.  Not only does he have no idea who Benedict Arnold is (and B.A. is name-dropped at least as much as Raquel Welch on Bunch), but he's somehow developed the erroneous impression that Mike and Carol were permissive parents.  True, they rarely yelled at their kids, but they would never shrug off an F on a History paper.

That aside, once we get into Ross's dream, where he's Chuck Brady (a nod to Happy Days I believe), it's almost as much fun as the studio audience thinks it is.  (Really, they sound like they're having the laughter and applause equivalents of orgasms.)  Some of it's just sheer affection and delight when any Brady cast member enters the still '70s-looking room, and we do get to see six of the nine, including Bobby in a mustache and Marcia extremely pregnant.  To the credit of writer Andy Borowitz (who did five Square Pegs episodes, including the one with Bill Murray) and moonlighting-from-Who's-the-Boss? director Asaad Kelada, the Bradys and Alice are given things to do and say, genuinely funny lines and movements that they overact with obvious joy.  (Yes, Robert Reed, too.)

My guess is, given the episode title, this was commissioned right after the surprise hit of the Christmas TV-movie.  While not as "OMG, they got that in, too!" as the '90s movies, putting a cynical late '80s teen into this setting allows for Ross to be our surrogate and react to things like the "serious" instrumental music that plays during advice scenes, and indeed his own succumbing to the Brady wardrobe and "perm."  Bear in mind that in '89, mocking the Bunch in this affectionate way was still relatively new.  (The staging of episodes as The Real Live Brady Bunch, with Jane Lynch and Andy Richter, was still a couple years off.)  So that's part of what's going on with the studio audience, too, the shock of recognition.  I think even a casual Bunch viewer would still get a kick out of this, almost three decades later.  And, yes, that is a post-SNL and pre-Seinfeld Julia Louis-Dreyfus lusting after Greg Brady.