Here’s the story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls…
Mike and Carol Brady, now ‘muppies’ (middle-aged yuppies) running an empty nest household, are keeping secrets from each other but, not from the kids. Each spouse is secretly planning a trip as a Christmas gift to the other. Mike’s gift is a trip to Japan, and Carol’s is a trip to Greece, and each spills the beans to each kid over the phone in turn.
Alice re-enters their lives after Sam the butcher left her for another woman and Mike reads her ‘Dear Alice’ note aloud, which is surprisingly suggestive for a Brady show.
The trip debacle is revealed when each shows up at the travel agency to book the trip-and Mike even calls out the plot plagiarism from O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi. When reminiscing on vacations of old with the family, they decided to instead use the money to bring all the kids and their respective families home for Christmas-yes, all 13 of them.
When a real estate client calls Carol to complain about Mike’s concerns over him cutting corners with his construction, this sets up an A/B story…(and C through G as well) alternating between Mike and the building code issues and each respective Brady kid with their individual difficulties and family problems in making plans to make it home for Christmas. But there’s nothing that can’t be solved with Mom and Dad’s advice and Alice’s pie.
The movie climaxes when Mike responds to an emergency at that construction site where the building has collapsed and Mike gets trapped inside. Will the Bradys get a Christmas miracle?
This aired in 1988 on CBS as a two-hour movie and was the first Brady reunion show since the ill-executed The Brady Brides in 1981. To the credit of the writers and producers, story continuity from that short series was continued, bringing back Jerry Houser as Wally Logan, Marcia’s husband, and Ron Kuhlman as Philip Covington III, Jan’s husband. Unfortunately, Allan Melvin did not return as Sam the butcher, with that role filled by Lewis Arquette mostly covered by a Santa costume. All the Brady actors returned, with the exception of Susan Olsen who was on her honeymoon in Jamaica at the time. According to Olsen, producers only had to deliver five out of six kids returning for the movie to be greenlit-and in order to save on salary, considered Cindy’s character to be the most expendable and didn’t want to pay her on par with the other five. So she decided to head to Jamaica with her new husband. Jennifer Runyon replaced her. You might remember her from Charles In Charge or Ghostbusters. (I was just gonna say…8 o’clock?) With the exception of The Brady Brides, all Brady reunions had one of the girls replaced due to not returning.
TV reunion movies were insanely popular in the 80s as the kids that watched the shows in the 60s-now grown with their own kids-tuned in to mainline the nostalgia when the cast reunited. Brady Christmas was the second-highest-rated TV movie of the season with an incredible 39 share. Can you imagine 39% of American TV households watching the same show at the same time? The success of AVBC led CBS to approve a new series for the 1989-90 TV season, and The Bradys was born. The Bradys was a one-hour ‘dramedy’ that attempted to emulate Thirtysomething. There was always some kind of melodrama-Bobby became a paraplegic, Peter broke up with his fiancé, Jan and Philip adopt, and most famously Marcia battled alcoholism as Wally lost job after job. The show was quietly taken off the schedule and canceled after six episodes.
Paramount Home Video released AVBC on VHS in 1992-in limited quantities-as the special was largely critically panned. Over time, however, viewer nostalgia took hold as it was recognized as the final decent effort of the original Brady franchise, especially with the deaths of Robert Reed and Ann B. Davis. The demand for the video increased and it was a frequent rental at video stores, and later unofficial copies became popular on YouTube every holiday season. Paramount Home Entertainment finally released it on DVD in 2017, 25 years after the original VHS release. Today you can watch it on Hulu (subscription) or Pluto TV.
It may be a little saccharine and pat, but for Brady fans, it sells the nostalgia-and now can be watched with your grandkids.
Socially Distant Cinema is a column that will regularly point you to content from the 70s/80s currently available on various platforms that may bring you some entertainment during these periods of physical distancing...and beyond.
