Season 4, Episode 6
Original Air Date: October 27, 1972
Here’s the story… of how I watched an episode of The Brady Bunch for the first time in 25 years.
This a show that I’m sure people of a certain age probably have a fair amount of nostalgia for, but I’m not quite of that certain age. That said, I do have memories of The Brady Bunch reruns airing on Nickelodeon in the late ’90s for reasons that aren’t terribly clear to me. At the time, I thought the show was passible entertainment, but even then felt of a different time, despite the most topical thing about the show being its garishly groovy fashion. I was a bit surprised to read that The Brady Bunch wasn’t one of the more popular shows on television when it was airing, but instead earned its cultural ubiquity in syndication. I’ll get into my theories as to why this show became so popular later, but let’s get into this spooky episode that much like the episode of Dick Van Dyke I reviewed, aired early in the fourth season of a five-season run.
“Fright Night” begins by focusing not on the Brady kids, but instead on their parents, as Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) is sculpting a bust of her husband Mike (Robert Reed), which she’s planning on entering in a local art contest. We then see that upstairs, Jan (Eve Plumb) and Cindy (Susan Olsen) are fast asleep, but are awoken by the image of a ghost that they see in their backyard. After they go crying to their parents, Carol and Mike then investigate the attic and find an open window, they deduce it was probably just the wind making some creepy noises in the night. However, oldest sister Marcia (Maureen McCormick) believes it was the Brady boys who made this ghost appear, before finding a slide projector in the attic with a slide containing the image of one of the boys wearing a white sheet.
The next night, the younger boys, Peter (Christopher Knight) and Bobby (Mike Lookinland) decide they want to sleep in the attic, which gives the girls an idea to get back at them for their prank. They stage a ghost of their own, using cellophane wrap and a tape recorder playing Cindy’s screams that leave the boys similarly scared in the middle of the night. When they go screaming to their older brother Greg (Barry Williams), he deduces that the ghost is fake and it was just the girls getting back at them. Later, they kids are having a conversation with the housekeeper Alice (Ann B. Davis), who says that there isn’t a single thing in the world that she’s afraid of. So the girls and boys team up to scare Alice with a new ghost of their own while Carol and Mike are out for the night. But when Carol and Mike get home early, the kids accidentally break Carol’s award-winning bust, and in the end, learn a real lesson about letting pranks get out of hand.
The thing that surprised me the most about “Fright Night” was how incredibly low the stakes feel, despite the fact that most sitcom plots typically feel pretty low-stakes. But maybe the fact that it all takes place in the realm of kid drama makes this storyline about fake ghosts and getting back at your siblings feel especially benign. That said, there is something inherently a little charming about these types of shenanigans, but maybe being someone who is very far away from childhood and who has little interest in having kids colored my relative disinterest in this episode. Still, there is something fun about the parents spending their time concentrating on this art project in the background, and not on their jobs or housekeeping duties.
This all made me beg the question that I often ask during my somewhat recurring People’s Album reviews: why was this popular? Well, as I mentioned earlier, The Brady Bunch wasn’t actually that popular during its original run, probably because I don’t think adults watching this in primetime would be that enthralled by this very wholesome family show when they could be watching more thought-provoking comedy on All In The Family or MASH. But, I have to imagine that there weren’t a lot of sitcoms tailored towards kids at the time, since the onslaught and revolution of children’s television wouldn’t happen until the ’80s and ’90s. So in The Brady Bunch, you had a sitcom that was mostly about kids and ended up being mostly for kids, which also had the added element of feeling relatable for mixed families, which were becoming more common at the time.
But how does this stack up as a Halloween episode? Well, fine I suppose. I feel like me and Sean have already been running into these episodes that aired around Halloween time and have Halloween vibes, but don’t go out of their way to be specifically about Halloween. I kind of wish the kids had gotten into creating some sort of scary entity in the house other than just a ghost, but three different times. But as I’ve already seen, ghosts are the most believable monster that could conceivably make an appearance on a sitcom, and we’ll see in my next review how they stack up to the ghost with the most.