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Barry Williams on how he made peace with The Brady Bunch
Williams went on a journey with the show.
The Brady Bunch catches a lot of flack for its endless positivity. While the show found a warm welcome in viewers, in the years that it's been off the air, the show's reputation has soured slightly and is often considered to be one of the more cheesy or superficial shows of the sixties and seventies.
Even the cast members are aware of the reputation that follows the show. Barry Williams, known as Greg Brady, spoke to the Ashbury Park Press and called a scene "corny as heck," but still managed to find merit in it.
"All of a sudden, corny was...it was the style of the show. I made peace with being a Brady"
Williams didn't find this peace during the original run of The Brady Bunch. Rather, it came in 1988, when he returned for the Brady Christmas special, A Very Brady Christmas.
"I really enjoyed it," he said. "I did because, for me, that was when I made peace with The Brady Bunch. When the network had us back — and I know how the networks work — the networks only care about numbers. Which meant, to me, that they'd already done their research, they already knew that there was a market for this — and a big one — for our show."
For The Brady Bunch to still be garnering fans in the decade after it had wrapped filming was no easy feat. Moreover, it's an act that the show still manages to accomplish today, gathering viewers from every generation, young and old.
"To me, it meant that we had kind of transcended just being a little ditty from the seventies that was totally inconsequential," Williams said. "And it means that there was a viewer loyalty that we had kind of survived the test of time. At that point, I could kind of just let it be. It kind of legitimized the early series for me, and then we had fun filming it."
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