Plans Change

It's pretty easy to make fun of The Brady Bunch, with its corny dialogue, goofy hairstyles, and hopelessly outdated mores. But this silly little show served as important cultural touchstone for people of my generation, as alluded to in the otherwise annoying Gen-X film comedy Reality Bites. It might be an exaggeration to suggest that The Brady Bunch was ahead of its time or that it was thematically complex, but it was a show of contradictions, a sitcom that idealized family life while celebrating the 1970s-era blended family. This was a show that, for all its flaws, continued to speak to viewers for many years after its initial run, as evidenced by its incredible popularity in reruns. (In fact, the show was more popular in reruns and was only known by people of my age as a show that came on after school.)

The other day, while on vacation in Puerto Rico, I apparently spent a little too much time lying in the sun and began idly thinking about those Brady Bunch vacation episodes. You know the episodes I mean -- the two-part Hawaii vacation in which Bobby finds a Tiki idol and Greg has a surfing accident, or when Bobby gets lost in the Grand Canyon (it seems Bobby was a bit bored on these vacations) and the family gets locked in a jail in a ghost town.

There was a less-remembered "special" vacation episode in which the family visits an amusement park in Ohio or something. This was not exactly as exciting as Hawaii or the Grand Canyon (talk about cliche middle-class vacation destinations, anyway), but the kids responded with great excitement, as always, to Mr. Brady's announcement at the beginning of the episode. It was supposed  to be a just a business trip for  Mr. Brady, after all. Yet somehow Mr. Philips and the other folks down at the architecture firm agreed to pay for Mr. Brady to take along his wife, their six kids, AND their maid.

The central mix-up of the episode's plot had Jan accidentally switching a Hanna-Barbera poster she'd bought at the amusement park with her dad's important architecture plans. I don't remember how Jan had access to her dad's plans, or why Mr. Brady left them lying about (he was probably getting drunk in the hotel bar). I also don't know whether as a kid I questioned the likelihood of Jan's poster (in its yellow tube) looking exactly like Mr. Brady's plans. I do remember thinking as a kid, What kind of doofus buys a poster at an amusement park, especially at the beginning of the day, when you know you'll have to haul the stupid thing around with you on all the rides? Geez, Marcia must have been annoyed with her, but then, Jan was always causing problems like this.

The incredible inanity of the plot was just one thing that made this a classic Brady episode. It had a lot of other classic elements: Jan screwing something up, Bobby and Cindy spending all their time eating, Greg smooth-talking a girl, the zany slapstick marathon running-of-the-poster through the park scene at the episode's climax. But the episode also, like so many Brady Bunch episodes, conveyed an important philosophical lesson, a lesson about the nature of plans.

Mr. Brady represents the Every Man of American culture, an upper-middle-class suburbanite with modest aspirations who is primarily motivated by a need to keep his family secure and happy. Of course, Mr. Brady also serves as the family's philosophical guide, teacher of morals, and a wise, Solomon-like arbitrator. He resolves problems in the family, but he also makes sure that his children learn something from their difficulties through careful self-reflection and moral inquiry.


In the amusement-park episode, Mr. Brady begins with an original set of masterful plans, expertly designed and perfectly executed. Yet he ends up with a full-color poster of Huckleberry Hound. As the usually misquoted poem goes (or doesn't go), "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." A neat and perfect plan can turn into something that is so chaotic and directionless it isn't a plan at all, just a cartoon swirl of colors and shapes. To put it more simply, sometimes your best plans unexpectedly turn into a poster of a stupid cartoon dog.

What do you do with such a plan? If you're the Bradys, you run around the park until you find the original plans and then do a relay race to the inevitable happy ending, passing the plans like a baton from one family member to the next. But you could also accept that sometimes plans don't work out, and that sometimes, in that symbolic sense implied by the changing of the plans here, a good plan turns into a cartoonish mess that's impossible to follow. At that point, you can just give up, or you can roll with it, and see how the new plan might develop into something workable.

If you put aside the silliness of the idea that the two posters would be stored in nearly identical tubes, you can see another philosophical message at work here. Many plans look alike on the outside, and it's only by breaking them open and really beginning to work with them that we can see what we're dealing with. A plan isn't really a good plan or a bad plan until it works or doesn't work. The plan has to translate to practical, real-world viability. The plan has to come out of the tube.

The Brady Bunch is in a more general sense a show about how plans sometimes change. You get married, have kids, and expect to spend the rest of your life with someone. But then your spouse dies (or divorces you, as may have been the case with Mrs. Brady's first husband), and you find your life changing in big and unexpected ways. Sometimes plan change. You have to deal with it one way or another.

We think of the Bradys as an unrealistically perfect family, but really it's an imperfect family that knows how to adjust to the changes life has in store for all of us. You take whatever plans you end up with, and you run with them, sprinting toward a happy ending. If your plans end up not working, for whatever reason, you take positive action -- you enlist your family to help pull you out of the mess, you make new plans, or you roll with the changes as best you can.