Welcome to the official Barry Williams' blog
My friends call me Barry. From time to time I also hear the name Greg. Yeah, as in Greg Brady. The Brady Bunch represents a fun time in my life. But it’s only part of the story. There’s more to say and that’s what The Greg Brady Project is all about - a place to say it. So, I’ve invited some friends to join me and share their perspectives on the Brady’s, the 70’s and just about everything else. Now, I’m inviting you…
Christopher: a moniker with staying power.
You might think of the Social Security Administration as a rather monotonous bureaucratic arm of our government, a sea of anonymous cubicles inhabited by humorless accountants. But think again: these people know how to have fun with data. Sure, they have to issue all of those sacred, 9-digit numbers to every citizen and attend to the rather serious business of allocating funds to retirees. Along the way, though, they make time to compile an annual list of the 1,000 most popular names bestowed upon babies each year. The 2007 list was just released, and the names Jacob and Emily, reigning king and queen of infant nomenclature, have been echoing from every media canyon and crevasse. The SSA finds this so compelling that its website offers the top 1,000 baby names for every year since 1880 (In case you were wondering, John and Mary were the Jacob and Emily of that year).
Now, at last, pop culture pundits have at their fingertips a tool that can answer the question that has been nagging us for so long: What impact did “The Brady Bunch” have on our nation’s baby name preferences? After surveying the last 100 years of data, I can tell you that the answer is…well, almost no impact at all. All six of the Brady sibling names peaked in popularity well before the series debuted in 1969 (For you statisticians out there, here are the names and their peak positions/years - Greg: #77/1961-62; Marcia: #74/1951; Peter: #35/1955; Jan: #131/1954; Bobby: #23/1934; Cindy: #19/1957. How appropriate is it that the self-esteem-challenged Jan had the least popular name?).
‘Mom’
One of the funniest stories from Barry’s Growing Up Brady concerns his adolescent crush on Florence Henderson. The tale prompted a lot of publicity due to its apparently taboo nature. Taboo, that is, until we understand that: 1) their celebrated “date” was as innocent as a Brady Bunch episode, and 2) Florence Henderson is not Barry’s mother, fer cryin’ out loud! Barry himself has tried to help us understand this, writing the following: “Most everybody thinks of Florence Henderson as the quintessential television mom, and that vaguely oedipal association seems to have successfully inhibited the American public from ever realizing what a totally white-hot babe she really is.” Sorry, Barry, but I’m not buying it. She might not be your mom, but the rest of us can’t shake the conviction that she is our mom.
Recent surveys support this notion. As Eric Greenberg reported, Carol Brady came in third place (behind Clair Huxtable and Marion Cunningham) when TiVo asked viewers to identify their favorite TV mom. A recent Harris Poll found similar results after asking people to name the TV mom they wished had raised them. Once again, our Lovely Lady took third place (this time following June Cleaver and Clair Huxtable). Interestingly, when the Harris folks broke down their data into demographic chunks, they found that Carol Brady was the number one TV mom among two subgroups: Gen Xers and Republicans. Among conservatives aged 32 to 43, presumably, that preference must be through the roof.
‘Family #2′
Often times I am asked what it was like to basically have two families, my natural family with Mom and Dad and my two older brothers and my Brady family. First, please understand there was never any confusion about which was real. I didn’t go to Maureen McCormick for sisterly advice for goodness sake, I had the hots for her. Nor for instance did I ever confuse Robert Reed as being my father, I already had a Dad.
As an actor, one of the really nice things about being on a successful TV series is that you don’t have to spend all of your time looking for a new job. You have your call times, your studio, a schedule, the crew and cast that becomes familial. In our case the cast was also playing a family and to some extent we all assumed those roles in life. When the Brady kids were on tour or making appearances, I was protective and fended for my Brady brothers and sisters just like the reliable big brother I played. Florence Henderson could see the road ahead and gently pointed out to me the smooth and the rough spots that were to come. Robert Reed did not assume the role of my father but I do consider him a mentor.
This is really cool. I had a man who was in our show acting as my father who took on some of those qualities and was interested in the same thing I was — ACTING. My own father didn’t know or really care very much about the craft, he was more interested in raising his three boys.
The Cincinnati Kids. Hawaii Bound. Pass the Tabu. The Tiki Caves. The Subject Was Noses. You might know the five aforementioned Brady Bunch episodes by the key words King’s Island, Hawaii, and Oh, my nose! Time and again as I interviewed fans who were gathered for a recent personal appearance by Barry, these shows were cited as personal favorites. Although I would agree that each of them is a classic, none of them appears in my Brady Six.
The Brady Six is your personal top-six list of favorite Bunch episodes. There is only one criterion for inclusion: each episode you choose should be one that you never tire of watching, the sort of show that causes you to be delighted as the opening credits conclude and you realize that one of the best Brady Bunchesever is on the air. While compiling my own list, I noticed that five of my six favorites include Greg in a prominent role. I swear on my tiki idol that my list would still be the same if I were blogging for the Cindy Brady Project! Here, then, presented in the order in which they originally aired, is my Brady Six.
Here are your Greg Brady Project links for the first full week of May:
The honors keep rolling in for Sherwood Schwartz. On the heels of his Hollywood star, the Brady creator will now be inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.
American Family Insurance is using a “Brady Bunch” theme in its new TV ad campaign.
The people over at TiVo are celebrating Mother’s Day early with their new list of TV’s all-time greatest moms. Clair Huxtable may have grabbed the top slot, but Carol Brady held her own.
Speaking of lists, Brady fans will be happy to see the show beat out classics like “Happy Days,” “Taxi,” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to land in the top half of AOL’s Best TV Comedies. (Thanks to USA Today’s Pop Candy for the tip off.)
Any “30 Rock” fans out there? The best sitcom on TV upped its game with a “Brady Bunch” reference two and a half minutes into last Thursday’s episode.
Send your Brady/Pop Culture links to eric.greenberg@thegregbradyproject.com.
The ubiquitous yellow smiley face of the 70’s has never faded away, especially at Wal-Mart, where its contemporary cousin accompanies every in-store “price rollback.” But for the people of Canton, Ohio, there were quite a few more smiles in the aisles than usual on a recent Sunday thanks to the arrival of another 70’s icon: Barry Williams. There he was, sitting at a table near the front registers, and woe to the casual shopper who merely wanted to take the shortest path from greeting cards to the pharmacy. That route was occupied by a steady presence of fans and admirers. They snapped up autographed merchandise, captured photos, and mostly, they smiled.
Local resident Marcia Miller provided the reason why. “I’ve just always been a Brady Bunch fan,” she enthused, “because it was just one of those shows that made you feel real good.” With a prized CD of Meet the Brady Bunch in hand, she had arrived two hours prior to the scheduled start of Barry’s autograph session. Marcia described herself as a fan “ever since the show came on, 1968 to 1974,” and like others in attendance, she singled out the King’s Island show, Hawaii episodes, and Marcia Brady’s disastrous encounter with a football as memorable highlights.
Who knew there are so many powerful “Brady Bunch” fans out there? In Sunday’s ”World Wide Web Surfing” post, I linked to a story about Indiana gubernatorial candidate Jim Schellinger having become an architect because of Mike Brady. Well long before seeing that, I read a rumor that Indiana’s new governor and former Congressman Bobby Jindal (born Piyush Jindal) took his first name from another Brady. Last night, he confirmed it on “The Tonight Show:”
“You know, unfortunately the rumors are true…I watched a lot of TV growing up. And when I was four years old, my mom went to pick me up from school and the teacher said, he’s got a new name. She says ‘what do you mean he’s got a new name?’ And apparently I went to school one day and told my friends and my teachers to start calling me Bobby. It was off my favorite character of my favorite TV show. I was watching ‘The Brady Bunch’ and Bobby Brady…”
Just in time to goof off at work Monday morning, here’s your first set of Greg Brady Project links:
NBC announced the lineup for this summer’s ”Celebrity Circus” reality series. Check out which Brady is headed for the big top.
Despite the Oscar, there’s a lot more than Ray Charles coming out of Jamie Foxx’s piano. I’m guessing you’ve never heard the “Brady Bunch” theme like this.
Someone’s unloading their Topps “Brady Bunch” trading cards one by one on eBay. If you don’t mind the $4.95 starting bid, here’s a cool one of Greg.
Everybody has a MySpace page these days, even if you’re a nobody!
With the Indiana primary just over a week away, Jim Schellinger is in a tight race to become the democratic nominee for Governor. His opponent, Jill Long Thompson, is a former Congresswoman. He’s an architect. Guess why he got into that line of work?
Send your Brady/Pop Culture links to eric.greenberg@thegregbradyproject.com.
It’s been way too long since my last post. Good to see you again. So I had one of those weird TV coincidences the other night. I was watching “The Hills” on DVR and tossing some blog ideas around, thinking I might write an entry about the unpredictable sustainability of Neil Diamond’s career. Pretty random considering Heidi and Spencer may not even know who he is, and most of you reading here probably don’t know who Heidi and Spencer are. How do I get myself hooked on these shows? Anyway, I finished watching and started scanning the channel guide and there was “The Jazz Singer.” It was either a sign that somebody’s mad at me for skipping Passover seder or that this post is meant to be.
I had actually just seen “The Jazz Singer” for the first time on cable a few weeks ago and what was even more surprising to me is how much I liked it. Here’s some free advice: no matter how much you try to fight it, at some point in life, everyone becomes a Neil Diamond fan. The sooner you accept it, the better off you’ll be.
Celebrity is a funny thing. We enjoy a famous person’s work and occasionally catch a glimpse of what is purported to be the star’s personal life. After consuming magazine interviews, chat show appearances, and the standard fare from an official website, we are left to fill in the holes by inferring what our favorite celebrities are really like. With no evidence to the contrary, we are likely to project our own preferences and values upon our heroes. The more we do this, the greater the disillusionment when we discover - horror of horrors!- that the personality we’ve admired for so long thinks very differently than we do. The naivete of a fan, if you will.
I used to be a big Woody Allen fan. The outrageous non-sequiturs of his short stories and the surreal silliness of early films like Take the Money and Run and Sleeper struck a major chord during my adolescence. His intellectual persona gave me hope on the bleakest high school days that there was intelligent life out there, if not in my study hall. Even his experimentation with the more serious themes of Interiors and Stardust Memories intrigued me, and I admired the integrity of a talented director who demanded and received creative control of his films.
By early adulthood, I was an entrenched Woodyphile.
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