TV To Rot Your Ideals, Part 1: The Perfect Family, Brady Bunch

We all want that perfect family like The Brady Bunch, right? Pleasant dad, sweet mom, three boys, three girls (the youngest of course has curls), a dog, and a housekeeper so that sweet non working mom can lay around all day. What else could be more perfect? These are unattainable ideals even by TV standards. Even if we forget about the behind the scenes issues, The Brady Bunch is still not as perfect as you remember.

First off, Mike Brady is a widower meaning that a wife and mother of three had to die for The Brady Bunch to form. Not exactly happy. Yet none of the boys ever talk about their dead mother and even call Carol 'Mom". This seems to make the statement that wives and mothers are replaceable. Your mother died? Let's go get a new one.

Carol Brady is divorced. Out there some where is a dead beat dad named Mr. Martin (as this is her last name in the beginning but, her maiden name is Tyler). No one talks about him either and I never saw Carol opening child support papers. The first products of an absent father on television, not exactly perfect.

Then there is no wonder that the Brady girls have some disorders. Marica has signs of OCD, Jan has major jealously issues and extremely low self-esteem, and Cindy had a lisp and some developmental delays. It is not their fault that they have these issues but, why did their parents not put them in therapy? Jan really needed it for all of the problems she had displayed.

As you can see they were not a perfect family. They just pushed the issues under the rug and never brought them up again. Real life is not like this. You could have a happy family if you forget where you came from and ignored the elephants in the room. Or you could just hire that sunny housekeeper for your lazy wife. =)