Florence Henderson was 34 when she was cast as Carol Brady, an unmarried (presumably divorced; it’s still up for debate) mother of three little girls who met and married a widowed father of three sons, forming the happily blended brood of the hit TV sitcom “The Brady Bunch.” It says something about Hollywood and American grown-ups that, in 1969, 34 was thought to be more than mature enough to begin one’s attempt at a reasonable second act.
Like the character she played, Henderson (who died Thursday at 82 from heart failure) had already achieved much in her career as a stage and screen performer, as well as becoming a real-life spouse and mom. Silly as it seemed, the “Brady Bunch” pilot was Henderson’s big chance to shift from young Broadway ingenue parts to the more eternal role of nurturer.
Contrast that with what characters in their early 30s looks like in TV comedies now: Zooey Deschanel, for one example, was almost 32 when her Fox sitcom “New Girl” premiered in 2011, playing the role of a young single woman, at fits and starts in every aspect of her life, who moves into an apartment populated by men who are even less emotionally developed. Deschanel’s studied girlishness (termed “adorkable” in the press) was so aggravating that the show’s creator and writers stepped in and defended it as a subverted form of independence. New girl, new feminism: The childishness is somehow passed off as a trait of inner strength.
One of the remarkable things about watching a “Brady Bunch” episode in 2016, therefore, is how easy it is to understand who the adults are. In syndication, reruns of network sitcoms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s (and beyond) became a less expensive way to fill the gaps of daytime programming, and children, who had never seen “The Brady Bunch” in prime time, came home from school every day and absorbed the comfort and lessons seen in these tidy little narratives. No matter what was going on in your home life in the 1970s, shows such as “The Brady Bunch” acted as the original safe space, even if the Bradys looked or acted nothing like you.
Henderson’s performance as Carol wasn’t particularly complex. Unlike her co-star Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady (and complained about it, off and on, until his death in 1992), she exuded contentment, both as a character and as a performer. The role, in retrospect, is an odd one in which the star of show is so often relegated to reacting to the events happening to other characters. So often her line was a variation on “Oh, no!” upon hearing of the latest calamity experienced by everyone who actually got to leave the house: “Oh, Mike.” “Oh, Marcia.” “Oh, Jan.” “Oh, Greg.”
Carol is not overburdened with running the packed household; for that she has the family’s live-in housekeeper, Alice Nelson (played by Ann B. Davis, who died in 2014 and was all of 43 when “The Brady Bunch” first aired in 1969). Not for Carol the piles of laundry and a sit-down meatloaf dinner for eight. It’s easy to make jokes about her apparent uselessness – and her nearly psychotic cheerfulness – until you’ve soaked up a thousand or so repeat viewings and perhaps grown up enough to catch on to Carol’s true passion: Mike.
Not only is she wildly attracted to him (their sex life, or the frisky hint of it, was still rare for TV back then), she revels in the upgraded life he’s given her and her daughters – designing a split-level house where they fit together as one and providing a moral, masculine anchor to whatever chaos she and the girls were living in before. (Grand speculation about Carol’s former life abounds. Creator Sherwood Schwartz, who died in 2011, said ABC network brass wouldn’t allow the show to portray Carol as a divorcee. The Mike Brady character was already widowed, so Schwartz and company decided to just leave Carol’s marital history as a question mark.)
Carol races to the door every time Mike gets home from work. She sits near him in the evening hours. They read together in bed until he makes his move. They greet the gloriously sunny days in that orange kitchen with Alice’s freshly brewed coffee.
All of the attention in “The Brady Bunch” is more or less lavished on the children, who each achieved Tiger Beat deification and whose characters experienced every essentially harmless form of adolescent identity crisis there is, just brushing up against the actual tumult of the times but never succumbing to it – spared from all the bad stuff of the late ’60s and early ’70s, except the fashions. (Carol arguably suffered most in this regard, spending a few seasons in a shag/flip hairstyle that was an odd mash-up of “Klute” and “That Girl.”)
Henderson was quick to point out to the show’s critics that “The Brady Bunch” was best viewed through a child’s perspective. It’s a show about everything a child wants – a mommy and a daddy (only later would American culture be able to broaden that definition to two-parent households, regardless of gender), fun, laughter, rules and security. It takes a lot of years of reconsidering “The Brady Bunch” to realize how selfless and valuable the three characters who make up that middle leg of the Brady grid – Mike and Carol, with Alice in the symbolic center – really were. Those three were only nominally the stars of the show, allowing the young cast to blossom and blunder.
And now, with Henderson’s death, the grown-ups are all gone. That seems to be a recurring theme in 2016: Where are the parents we looked to for direction, the adults we leaned on for advice? Authority has gone wobbly on us. There’s a sense that Mom has left the stage.
