How 1995's Brady Bunch Movie casually eviscerated the perfect TV family of decades past

Anne-iversaries is a bi-weekly column by writer Anne T. Donahue that explores and celebrates the pop culture that defined the '90s and 2000s and the way it affects us now (with, of course, a few personal anecdotes along the way).

My parents hated The Brady Bunch. My dad grew up in a familial situation that couldn't be further from technicolour perfection, and my mom was a first-generation Canadian who described the series — even as a sweet baby teen — as "contrived [and] stupid." (A quote she just gave me, so shoutout to Dee.)

Thus, instead of Brady Bunch reruns growing up, I basked in syndicated episodes of Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda before graduating to selected series of the ABC TGIF lineup. I'd been raised to understand that no family was perfect, life crises couldn't be fixed in half an hour, and that aspiring to Brady Bunch-levels of happiness was unrealistic and weird.

The sitcoms of yore perpetuated the myth of familial bliss — of pure, unadulterated mutual love and respect and no hint of existential angst. Husbands went to work, wives looked after the home, and kids vied for their parents' adoration (which they always had, because their problems were easily solved within an honest conversation set to quiet music, capped off by a hug).

Not that this formula was exclusive to The Brady Bunch. The Partridge Family, Family Affair, My Three Sons, and Father Knows Best all towed the Happy Family™ line in the same era, and the 80s and 90s gave way to series crafted in the same spirit via Full House, Step By Step, and Home Improvement (and don't even get me started on 7th Heaven). But The Brady Bunch helped set the precedent. Carol and Mike Brady may have blended their families in the wake of losing their spouses, but the seamless transition into an eight-person unit reflected the absurdity of this fictional world where even losing a parent is a two-dimensional footnote.

Which was perfect fodder for a cinematic spoof two decades later. In 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie, the Bradys are (rightfully) seen as freaks — pod people stuck in a decade renowned for aesthetic kitsch, but so naive about the realities of the world that they seem almost alien. They're oblivious to issues of sex, drugs, and mid-90s teen rebellion, and their over-the-top reactions to dates for dances and neighbourly misunderstandings serve to highlight just how out of touch the Bradys are — not just in 1995, but in the 70s, too. (I mean, lest we forget that around the same time, series like All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Maude tackled everything from class to racism to abortion to sexuality. It's actually shocking to think The Brady Bunch existed in the same universe.)

As children of dysfunctional households, of divorce, of knowing full well that your parents were and are struggling to make ends meet, for us the myth of the perfect family had long been shattered.- Anne T. Donahue

The Brady Bunch wasn't alone in finding itself on the receiving end of a send-up in the 90s. Leave It to Beaver earned its own spoof in 1997; Dennis the Menace and The Beverly Hillbillies were brought to the big screen in 1993; The Flintstones got the live-action treatment in 1994; The Addams Family delivered in 1991 and 1993. And while the original Addams Family TV show is arguably a wonderful representation of the eccentricities that accompany the nuclear family (Morticia and Gomez genuinely love each other; their kids don't fit in but are loved enough by their parents not to care; they all question out-of-date social norms), the rest were built atop the ideal that families must look and function in a certain way. Parents were married (and if single, they were widowed — never divorced), kids listened obediently, and laughs were often at the expense of an idiot person whose wife or partner was meant to talk sense into him. In the original TV shows, conflicts were resolved within 20-something minutes, and physical comedy trumped one-liners and realistic quips. In their transition to the big screen, these families were all (rightfully) seen to acquaintances and neighbours as freakish.

As a kid, I watched Leave It To Beaver at my grandparents', confused as to how characters could complicate the simplest problems (and always noting what my dad pointed out: that Mrs. Cleaver put on gloves to leave the house, which was pristine and expected to be as such). My nana would use the half hour to make lunch or crochet, while my grandpa would walk in and out, completely uninterested in the goings-on of June, Walt, Wally, and a kid they cruelly nicknamed Beaver. The "perfect" 1950s family was foreign to them, too — even though pop culture pushed it on all of us so much.

The thing is, The Brady Bunch Movie came along at the perfect time. The Flintstones, The Addams Family, Dennis the Menace, and The Beverly Hillbillies were family-friendly enough not to sanction a PG-13 rating and played like live-action cartoons, but the Bradys-circa-'95 were risque enough to have to exclude kids from its target audience (as if that stopped us). And this matched the tone of the mid-90s: by then, Gen X was proudly jaded and had long been questioning the life paths of their predecessors, while (now-old) millennials were desperate to relate to their cooler, older brothers and sisters, wrapping themselves in the darker humour and cynicism that came to define the generation. As children of dysfunctional households (and who isn't?), of divorce, of knowing full well that your parents were and are struggling to make ends meet, for us the myth of the perfect family had long been shattered. And anything that had perpetuated it needed to be mocked and laughed at, if only as a means of reclamation. How dare pop culture imply that families were fine — or that any of us were?

But that's why The Brady Bunch Movie is worth remembering. In a decade that thrived on rejecting the norms of the generation before, it became a vital component in helping to dismantle the myth that perfect families exist. And even more radically, it did so by portraying that family almost exactly as they appeared on TV — which only served to highlight how preposterous rooting for them was. Was it a perfect film? Absolutely not. But as the Bradys taught us, most things that are tend to be terrible.