At the ‘Brady Bunch’ reno house, every day is a sunshine day — but weird
HGTV bought the house used in the opening credits. Now it's trying to restore it to precisely how it looked on the 1969-74 sitcom.
For his essay “Travels in Hyperreality,’’ the Italian author Umberto Eco journeyed across America to sample our peculiar national product: facsimiles. He visited a full-scale model of Lyndon Johnson’s Oval Office, wax museums, a “wild river’’ in Disneyland stocked with animatronic fauna, “instances in which the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.’’
Eco died in 2016, which is a shame, because I feel like he would have watched the hell out of “A Very Brady Renovation.’’
The HGTV series, which begins Monday, came about by kismet and a canny read of the current pop-cultural addiction to nostalgia. In 2018, the North Hollywood house that was used for exterior shots of the family home on “The Brady Bunch’’ went on the market. Executives at HGTV had a brainstorm: Buy it and, cameras rolling, restore it to precisely how it looked on the 1969-74 sitcom.
The hitch: The house you remember — the kitchen where the housekeeper Alice made pork chops, the entry where Carol Brady would greet her husband Mike after work — never existed.
Or rather, it existed the way most houses on sitcoms do, in your mind’s eye. It was a collection of separate sets on a soundstage, edited with exterior footage to synthesize the illusion of a warm, groovy mid-century home. Mike Brady may have been an architect, but TV supplied the home’s modular parts, and your brain completed the assembly.
So like Disney Imagineers or Las Vegas casino designers, HGTV set out to build something realer than real. They would rip up the house’s actual, disappointingly conventional interior, enlarge it (by 2,000 square feet, they say) and make a physical manifestation of something that never existed.
“A Very Brady Renovation’’ feels like the logical progression of, and the perfect metaphor for, the reboot and revival craze that has brought us “Fuller House’’ and “Twin Peaks: The Return,’’ that exhumed “Veronica Mars’’ and “Murphy Brown.’’ The vast mechanism of TV and streaming has become a “Star Trek’’ replicator of pop culture. If I want to see Jean-Luc Picard on my TV again: Make it so!
“The Brady Bunch’’ is the perfect show to reboot this way, because it has made a posthumous art of reproducing itself. Long before “Friends’’ liberated $100 million from Netflix’s pockets, it was the Patient Zero of TV nostalgia, extending its five-season life through reruns, spinoffs, TV movies, theatrical movies, cartoons, a variety show, memes (“Sure, Jan’’) and not a few tell-alls and documentaries. Its memory surpassed its actual existence.
And memory is what HGTV is selling here — well, memory and its own brand. “A Very Brady Renovation’’ casts the hosts of no less than five of the network’s shows: “Good Bones,’’ “Restored by the Fords,’’ “Flea Market Flip,’’ “Hidden Potential’’ and, of course, “Property Brothers,’’ whose charismatic and ubiquitous Jonathan and Drew Scott anchor the 90-minute first episode.
They’re joined by the six original Brady sibs, Christopher Knight (Peter), Mike Lookinland (Bobby), Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Susan Olsen (Cindy), Eve Plumb (Jan) and Barry Williams (Greg). (The older stars Ann B. Davis, Florence Henderson, and Robert Reed have all died.)
The show drives eagerly onto Memory Lane and floors the accelerator. The show’s theme song is, of course, a parody of the original show’s. (“That’s the way we remade the Brady house!’’) The rebuild of the entryway stairs is accompanied by clips of Marcia walking down the steps and the family posing on them. A demolition scene is scored with “Sunshine Day.’’ Re-creating the decorative tchotchkes leads, of course, to footage of the legendary “don’t play ball in the house!’’ basketball disaster.
For all the milking of memories and stagey-seeming “behind-the-scenes’’ moments, the opening episode is a treat for TV and set-design nerds, getting deep into the weeds about the art of scouring the Internet and secondhand outlets to find the precise piece of turn-of-the-’70s kitsch.
The crew studies photos of the original set posted to boards as if reconstructing a crime scene. For certain hard-to-find pieces, like a chef’s-kiss-perfect set of plastic grapes, the production crowdsources contributions from the HGTV audience. “Thanks, America!’’ a voice-over tells us. “The Brady house really is your house!’’
It really is ours, even if HGTV holds the deed. (HGTV is keeping the house and giving away a six-night stay in an audience contest.) You can imagine a version of America in which the rebuilt-as-it-never-was Brady house becomes a modern-day Monticello, a cultural monument for an era in which phantom memories of TV spaces seem as real and emotionally binding as spaces we encounter every day with our meat bodies. It’s not just fans who are susceptible to this pull. As the cast members drive up at the end of the first episode to see the house, whose facade and landscaping has been overhauled to mimic the B-roll shot in the sitcom, someone exclaims, “It’s just like on TV!’’
Of course, as the members of the cast note, they only know that the same way we do, by having seen it on TV. They did their work on a soundstage far from there. They’re coming home to somewhere they’ve never been.
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