What Will They Do to the Brady Bunch?

Because when you’re a kid and you don’t know any better, I based my general outlook on life on two things:

1. Did I get bullied at school today?
2. What did the Brady Bunch do today?

A good day meant the answer to No. 1 was “no,” and the answer to No. 2 didn’t matter, because whatever happened to the Brady Bunch was bound to be good.

First time I realized a kid could legally be better at something than an adult? When Bobby Brady became a pool shark and snookered Mr. Howell out of 256 packs of gum.



(There was, of course, the unfortunate clothes washer disaster also involving Bobby, but that could be forgiven as clothes washers were complicated devices only mothers knew how to run properly.)



And let’s face it. We all knew Mr. Brady was an architect. The house was as equal a character in the show as Alice and stupid stupid Cousin Oliver. Right down to where Alice, spooked by the unfamiliar unlightedness of the house when the kids started a spook alley, took out a bust of Mr. Brady out of fear. (This is when I learned that ladies could be scary in their own right, what with Alice bashing things with her purse.)



So you have to wonder what HGTV is going to do with the Brady Bunch house – or at least the house used for the show’s exterior scenes – now that they own it.

They want to restore it to its 1970s glory, like only HGTV can, they say in a press release.

What would be fun would be to see some of the Brady interiors show up. But as the Brady house and the house on Dilling Street aren’t laid out exactly the same, doing that might not actually happen.