The Brady Bunch Had A Lot Of Spin-Offs You Didn't Realize Existed

Sherwood Schwartz's 1969 sitcom "The Brady Bunch" was progressive and retrogressive at the same time. On the one hand, it vaunted the virtues of remarrying and finding new families, showing that step-siblings and second spouses could produce as harmonious a domestic unit as more traditional nuclear families. On the other hand, the characters were clean-cut and virtuous to a cartoonish degree, only expressing the blandest sorts of domestic turmoil. It's easy to be harmonious when every member of the family is scrupulous and clean. The show was more about mild, silly pet peeves than about legitimately hard-hitting clashes of character. 

Of course, "hard-hitting" was not Schwartz's métier. He was a writer of high-concept, light-hearted comedies. This was, after all, the "Gilligan's Island" guy. He wasn't about to skew into Neil LaBute family dramas with "The Brady Bunch." 

And "The Brady Bunch" was huge. It lasted a gangbusters 117 episodes over its five seasons, and audiences got to witness Bobby, Cindy, Greg, Marcia, Peter, and Jan (Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen, Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, Christopher Knight, and Eve Plumb) all grow up in real time. A lot of youths watching developed crushes on one of the Brady kids during its initial run, or perhaps even on Mr. and Mrs. Brady, played by Robert Reed and Florence Henderson. And everyone loved the live-in maid, Alice (Ann B. Davis). 

Some "Brady" obsessives may recall one or two of the show's ill-fated spin-offs, and most fans recall the "Barbie"-like meta-reboot "The Brady Bunch Movie" from 1995 (and its follow-up "A Very Brady Sequel" in 1996), but there was a pile — a huuuge pile — of Bradyana that unexperienced pop culture spelunkers may not yet know about. Below is a list of all the Brady spinoffs you never learned about. 

The first "Brady Bunch" spin-off actually failed. An episode from final season of the series, called "Kelly's Kids" (January 4, 1974), was actually set up as a backdoor pilot for a new sitcom about the Bradys neighbors, Ken and Kathy (Ken Berry and Brooke Bundy). In the episode, Ken and Kathy adopt three young sons from a local orphanage (played by Todd Lookinland, William Attmore II, and Carey Wong), and build a pleasant, sitcom-ready found-family of their own. Ken and Kathy, however, had a deeply bigoted neighbor named Mrs. Payne (Molly Dodd) who was incensed that her white neighbors adopted a white son, a Black son, and an Asian son. The series wasn't picked up, but Schwartz later pitched the exact same premise series "Together We Stand," which aired on CBS in 1986. That show — with Elliott Gould, Dee Wallace, and Ke Huy Quan — only ran for 16 episodes, though, and changed its title to "Nothing is Easy" in its seventh week. It's not an official "Brady Bunch" spin-off, but it counts. 

The famed animation studio Filmation developed "The Brady Bunch" into a cartoon series in 1972, and even re-assembled the show's original "kid" cast members, at least for its first 17-episode season. "The Brady Kids," was, as its title implies, just about the six Brady kids and their fantastical adventures out of sight of their parents. In the show's second, five-episode season, Greg and Marcia were replaced by Lane and Erika Scheimer, the kids of Filmation head honcho Lou Scheimer. There's a very good reason few people remember the "Brady Bunch" animated series: it's not very good. Scheimer and Schwartz would work together again on "The New Adventures of Gilligan" and "Gilligan's Planet."

Many may remember the short-lived and ill-conceived 1976 series "The Brady Bunch Hour," a variety show that lasted for nine episodes. Infamously, Eve Plumb decided to drop out of the show, leaving Jan to be played by actress Geri Reischl.  

"The Brady Bunch Hour" was partly a continuation of "The Brady Bunch," following the nine main characters out to Los Angeles where they broke into show business, taking command of a popular family-themed stage show. The bulk of the series, however, was a string of straight-to-the-camera song-and-dance productions wherein the cast got to show off their performance chops. Everyone performed well, but golly, the show is insufferable.

That show was followed in 1981 by a three-episode reunion special called "The Brady Girls Get Married," a series that saw the weddings of Jan, Marcia, and Cindy. Eve Plumb returned for it. Because "Get Married" was essentially a TV movie that was split into three episodes, Sherwood Schwartz was able to hustle it into, functionally, another backdoor pilot. "The Brady Brides" piggybacked onto the special, and it lasted seven additional episodes. Did you want to see the Brady girls as adults? No? No one did.

In 1988, there was a notorious Christmas special called "A Very Brady Christmas," and it proved to be massively popular. Schwartz immediately began to hustle again, pitching a new series, simply called "The Bradys," featuring most of the same cast (Leah Ayres took over playing Marcia). The series, perhaps predictably, was also unpopular, lasting only six episodes in the early months of 1990. One of the Brady grandchildren was played by Jonathan Taylor Thomas. 

Thereafter, the "Brady Bunch" cast members only played on game shows and one-shot cameos on other shows. In 2024, Susan Olsen claimed that another "Brady Bunch" revival was in the works, but it was shut down after she was found to have expressed a lot of homophobic views on podcasts and online. 

The ironic, self-aware "Brady" movies were hits in the 1990s, but that was the official end of the road for "The Brady Bunch." No one has wanted to revive it since. Perhaps the idea of a blended family just isn't as novel as it was in 1969.