Transcript for Episode 43: A Very Brady Christmas Is Gay Enough, Says Drew and Glen

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss A Very Brady Christmas. If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Bobby:  Dad, were you necessarily talking about me? 

Mike:  No.

Bobby:  Well, good—but I'm just going to come right out and say what I have to say anyway. I never wanted to hurt you either, but I'm not in graduate school anymore. I dropped out a year ago to become a race car driver. 

Carol:  Ah. Race car driver? 

Bobby:  It's what I've always wanted to do. I know that you and Dad really want me to finish my business courses.

Mr. Brady:  Yes, we do. We always wanted you to be happy too. 

Bobby:  Driving is what makes me happy, so that's what I'm doing. 

Carol:  Whether we approve or not? 

Bobby:  Yes. 

Carol:  Bobby, it's so dangerous. 

Mike:  Bob—[sighs]. Well, I didn't always do what my parents wanted me to do. It's your decision to make.

Bobby:  If racing doesn't work out I promise I'll go back to business school, but right now this is what I need to do. 

Carol:  Be careful Bobby—and win.

[audience laughs]  

[“The Brady Bunch” performed by The Brady Six plays]

Drew:  Hello, and welcome to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast where we talk about the LGBT-focused episodes of classic sitcoms, which is to say the very special episodes that also happen to be very queer episodes. I'm Drew Mackie.

Glen:  I'm Santa Claus. 

Drew:  You shaved your beard so you're not even—you're less Santa Claus now.  

Glen:  I'm Glen.

Drew:  You're Glen Lakin. 

Glen:  That's right. 

Drew:  Yeah. And this is our Christmas special.

Glen:  [singing] Jingle Bells. That's as much as I want to do. 

Drew:  In case that intro did not tip you off, today we are talking about The Brady Bunch.

Glen:  If the intro did not tip them off, they are listening to the wrong podcast.

Drew:  I mean, it's going to be grown-up versions of people, so maybe the kids at least will sound different. I don't know what clip we're actually going to open with, but we should probably figure it out. We are specifically talking about the Christmas special.

Glen:  A Very Brady Christmas.

Drew:  A Very Brady Christmas. Thank you. Thank you, Glen. Yeah.

Glen:  You didn't say it fast enough. 

Drew:  I clearly was en route to it. Anyway, if you're familiar with this special you might say, “There's nothing really that gay about it,” to which we say—

Glen:  So what? 

Drew:  [laughs] I would say, “You have a shitty attitude.” We say, “Hey, maybe there is???”

Glen:  Question mark, question mark, question mark?

Drew:  Yeah. We just wanted to talk about it. A few weeks ago we asked for suggestions for Christmas specials of the variety show sense and some people did come up with some good ones, but none of them were super interesting to about because it would just be like, "And then this person came out and sang this song," and we'd be talking about musical numbers, and I don't really want to do that. 

Glen:  Came out in the wrong way—in the wrong sense.   

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah. So this is something that we both grew up enjoying. When did you first see this?

Glen:  Oh, I don't know—of an age. Probably when it came out. 

Drew:  1988? 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  So it aired on CBS, which is interesting because the original show aired on ABC. I'm not exactly sure how that happened. But I grew up watching reruns of The Brady Bunch—again, not knowing it was a show for adults. I just thought it was for kids because the plots are very simplistic—and I think I saw it in rerun form in the early '90s, years after the original broadcast, and had no idea that there was ever any sort of update to the original series.

Glen:  Yeah. I watched the original show in syndication as well in the afternoons, so nothing about it struck me as a sitcom for adults along the lines of the Phylicia Rashad Show. 

Drew:  Right. Right. We had much better shows I guess. And that's not to dump on it—

Glen:  Not better, just different. 

Drew:  Yes. It was of a different time. It's kind of the last of this sort of family-centered sitcom in some ways because the stuff we got in the '80s—stuff like Family Ties and Growing Pains—was more grown-up, and they actually dealt with issues, and it wasn't so sunny all the time.

Glen:  No, but if you compare it to something like Full House, it is of the same ilk in that Full House was geared more towards kids. It was a family sitcom for kids. You can't tell me that adults enjoyed that as much as kids did. 

Drew:  I'm sure they didn't, but at the very least Full House acknowledged that Pam died—like, the mom was dead—and in this series Mike's wife is dead, and that's never really a plot point. 

Glen:  Is it not mentioned in the pilot?

Drew:  It does explicitly say—if not in the pilot, early on—that Mike's a widower. They never say why Carol is single. So it's left—

Glen:  Immaculate conception. Three times.

Drew:  Well, she had a previous husband. We don't know if he's dead or if he was lost at sea, which is what they actually do in a Very Brady Sequel because they were uncomfortable with the idea of depicting divorce in a favorable light, even though literally an article about blended families is what inspired this show. Which Brady was your favorite?

Glen:  Jan, of course.

Drew:  Yeah. Jan's the most relatable and also she's the best actress. Right?

Glen:  Oh yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah.

Glen:  Well, other than new Cindy. 

Drew:  New Cindy's really good. 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  You might know her from stuff. We're going to get to replacement Cindy and why she's superior to the original Cindy in every way.

Glen:  But yeah and for A Very Brady Christmas I also had no idea what got them to this point. I only found out later about A Very Brady Wedding, where Marcia and Jan have a double wedding. 

Drew:  The Brady girls get married and then The Brady Brides, so there had been three different TV series in between the original Brady Bunch and this Christmas special, which I had no clue about because no one told me important history about American culture when I was growing up. 

Glen:  We'll talk about how the children in this episode are scattered to the wind, but if there was a TV show about them surely they lived in the same place. It wasn't all phone conversations.

Drew:  Yes. The Brady Brides revolved around the idea that Marcia and Jan have a double wedding and their husbands go in on a house together because they can't afford a house on their own. So these two newlywed couples are sharing a house in Los Angeles and zany, sexy hi-jinks. It's really—

Glen:  Not sexy hi-jinks.

Drew:  No it is sexy.

Glen:  Really?

Drew:  Yes. There's a scene where there's—I watched an episode last night while I was cooking dinner and it was Carol visits and Marcia and her husband who is the same actor we see in A Very Brady Christmas—

Glen:  Good. I was going to ask.

Drew:  They're in bed together and she's like, “My mom's here. Can you wear pants?” And he's like, “Oh. Oh, no. Oh, no.” And they're very physical with each other and it makes me very uncomfortable. It is going into a more ribald '80s sitcom, so they tried to update it.

Glen:  What I will say is that not knowing about any of the in between series I thought that the world felt at least very thought out. Like, “Oh, all these people have lives and they're not really introducing us to their lives at all.” We actually pick up information kind of on our own. They don't really spoon feed us— 

Drew:  Yes.

Glen:  Necessarily the situation that every child is in and I enjoyed that. 

Drew:  I enjoy it as well, and it was—the original show is a show—except for Carol's husband—is that show that explains everything very explicitly and this was like, “You'll figure it out,” and it is actually not a bad way to update a series and also drop you in the middle of stuff in a way that feels fairly organic. It's a nicely written, nicely written show. It was written by Sherwood Schwartz, the series creator, and his son Lloyd Schwartz.  

Glen:  That's cute.

Drew:  The Brady Bunch in case you somehow don't know is a show that ran for five seasons and 117 episodes on ABC from September 26, 1969, to March 8, 1974. After it was cancelled it went immediately into syndication and literally has never left. Ever since 1975, this show has been in heavy syndication, which is how most people our age saw it, I'm sure. It was never a hit.

Glen:  No.

Drew:  The highest it ever cracked during its entire run I think is in the third season it was the thirty-first most watched show. It never did better than that. It had a following and people were watching it, but I actually could not find anyone that said this specifically but I swear I have read that the entire enduring nature of the show is somewhat the original run, but mostly Generation X-ers who grew up with it airing in the afternoon around cartoons and watching it multiple, multiple times and getting this weird affinity for it even though it's not that funny and not the best written show in the world and that is what brought a stage revival, Brady Bunch Live, which then sort of led to the reboot and movies with Gary Cole and Shelley Long. 

Glen:  I have a friend who is much younger than his older siblings and they were allowed to name him, and they named him Greg after Greg Brady.

Drew:  I mean, it's not the worst of the children to be named after. 

Glen:  No, but that makes sense that Gen X-ers and people our age would have clung to it because it was airing with cartoons, but it wasn't a cartoon. It felt like an actual TV show, and it was for lack of a better term showing simpler times. Seventies and eighties would—I think—be when slightly more mature family problems would be creeping into television.

Drew:  Like families acknowledging the concept of divorce.

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah. and I agree. And it also makes a really interesting contrast against the grungy cynicism of the '90s where you have this dopey happy family singing their completely unironic songs and—yeah—it's kind of a mystery. I think it's interesting that we were talking about it as a Christmas special because I think it became popular for the same reason that It's a Wonderful Life became popular. It's a Wonderful Life not a hit in its theatrical run, was cheap to air so a bunch of stations would just air it on—around Christmas time because it didn't cost that much because no one liked it that much and that might have been the same reason this was not an expensive show to buy in syndication --I'm guessing.

Glen:  Oh. And sort of talking about The Brady Bunch versus the '90s—and we're not going to get into it—but The Brady Bunch Movie and The Very Brady Movie—

Drew:  A Very Brady Sequel was the title of it.

Glen:  Oh. Anyways. They were both brilliant movies for both lampooning the show but also honoring it in a strange way. Maybe one day we'll talk about them. 

Drew:  I did  an interview with Stan Zimmerman who did an uncredited rewrite of the first movie and is the credited writer along with his writing partner for the second movie had a lot of experience with those and—yeah, I think you're right—it is—it's a parody, it's a loving homage, it treads the line perfectly and they are two of my favorite things in the world and also kids like us were perfect for that because we were all around middle school age when those came out so we'd all grown up on those reruns and would have loved it as much as anyone who's around at the time and actually watched these when they first aired. The original series was created by Sherwood Schwartz, who also created Gilligan's Island and It's About Time, which is a sitcom about astronauts who break the speed of light and end up in caveman times and have to live with cavemen and it looks dreadful. And looking at Sherwood Schwartz's career I'm like, “The Brady Bunch was his prestige series.” That was the best one. That was the most grounded in reality of anything he did. He came up with it specifically because he read an article about blended families and no one wanted it initially until two movies found box office success in 1968: Yours, Mine, and Ours and With Three You Get Eggroll, which is a title I feel awkward saying—no. With Six You Get Eggroll—because there's six children. 

Glen:  Is Yours, Mine, and Ours the Lucille Ball one?

Drew:  Mm-Hmm.

Glen:  The production of that is actually an interesting story.

Drew:  Why? What happened? 

Glen:  Not really. It's not really interesting. It's just that it's nice because it was Lucille Ball again sort of flexing her muscles being like, “This is a book I like and a movie I want to produce, and this is how it's going to go.”

Drew:  And did it without Desi I assume.

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  Yeah. I've seen it actually. It's not bad. It was airing shortly after I got cable for the first time. I'm like, “Oh. I'll watch this.” It's not a bad family movie. Catchy theme song. So ABC bought it, and originally the role of Carol was supposed to be played by Joyce Bulifant who we talked about in the Bewitched episodes because she also played Marie, Murray's wife, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And then when Elizabeth Montgomery and her producer husband split up he married Joyce Bulifant and she had the role and then they're like, “Oh wait. Florence Henderson is free. Sorry Joyce.” And she said in interviews, “It was tough and also it's weird because they cast those girls to look like me,” but she looks like she could be Florence Henderson's sister. They look very, very similar—so whatever. She [ended up 00:13:00] fine. An interesting thing with Florence's lead up to this role—she was mostly—she'd been a stage actor and she was better known for singing than she was for—she hadn't had much of a TV presence except she was the Today Show Girl, which was before they allowed a woman to be an actual cohost they had a woman from the entertainment industry report on lady stuff and Barbara Walters was actually the last one because they promoted her to proper host. Florence herself described the job as tea pourer. That's how she felt about it. But the list of other women who had this job around the same time includes Estelle Parsons, who's the mom from Roseanne, and then Lee Meriwether—Catwoman, and then third Betsy Palmer who plays Pamela Voorhees in the original Friday the 13th. So I looked her up. Oh, my god she was a knockout. She has that same face, but I only really know her as Jason's—

Glen:  Murderous mother.

Drew:  Wearing an unflattering sweater and—

Glen:  Define unflattering.

Drew:  It's weird seeing that exact face on an ingenue and being like, “Oh, god. You were quite striking.” They all graduated to better things. Mike was—at one point the role was considered for Gene Hackman.

Glen:  Oh, my god.

Drew:  Which would have been a weird alternate reality. It went to Robert Reed instead, who I think came around to accepting it eventually, but I don't think he ever liked the show—poor guy. 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  He thought he was better than it—maybe he was. He was really critical of the scripts and would be like, “This doesn't make sense,” or he wanted there to be an element of satire or he wanted to do more of the show and they're like, “That's not what this show is.” 

Glen:  For those who listen to another podcast that you produce, Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie—he, Richard Reed, comes up more than once. He's in many TV movies perhaps trying to stretch his legs—his acting legs—in other roles. He plays a lot of priests in those doesn't he?

Drew:  Yeah. Especially in Haunts of the Very Rich. He plays a priest who's lost in faith—lost his faith in God and he has been defrocked for reasons that are never explicitly stated. And he's good in it, because he's doing something that's a lot deeper and more interesting than Mike Brady ever was. That said he's not bad as Mike Brady. He is giving a good performance and he is so fucking handsome. 

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  I think he might be my pick for the most handsome sitcom dad of all. 

Glen:  Huh. What I will say about the flashbacks to the original series that they show in this TV movie is that they do choose first season Mike and I believe first season Carol and both of them are just like—glow like angels. 

Drew:  They were a very attractive couple. I didn't want to look up how old they were. They were probably quite a bit younger than we are both right now. 

Glen:  Cool.

Drew:  Also Robert Reed was in Roots, so—

Glen:  Have we been—we've been calling him Richard Reed, which struck me as—

Drew:  Did I say Richard Reed?

Glen:  You said Richard Reed and so I said Richard Reed. 

Drew:  Maybe I was thinking of Fantastic Four and reversed it in my head.

Glen:  It's Reed Richards. 

Drew:  If I said Richard Reed earlier I apologize. That's incorrect. Robert Reed—RIP. Ann B. Davis was also not the first choice to play Alice. It was originally going to be an actress named Monty Margetts, but when they swapped Florence in for Joyce they felt they needed a different presence to play off of Carol and Ann B. Davis got the role. Ann B. Davis was around before. She'd won two Emmys for The Bob Cummings Show playing a character named Schultzy, which is why when she appears in The Brady Bunch Movie as that truck driver she's named Schultzy. We're skipping over some stuff, which is why this show is gay. I just want to go through the history of the show. Before we get into the actual show we'll have to go back and talk about Robert Reed and other elements of the show that read as gay at least to me, but before that I'm going to blow you away with some trivia.

Glen:  Should I hold on to my seat? 

Drew:  Hold on to your fucking socks too. There are a lot of shows that aired between this and A Very Brady Christmas. The first of which is The Brady Kids, which is a Saturday morning cartoon that had the kids going on magical adventures with a pair of pandas named Ping and Pong. 

[“The Brady Kids (Opening Theme)” performed by The Brady Six plays]

Drew:  This show is the first ever appearance of Wonder Woman in any sort of visual media—any sort of moving picture media. There's an episode where they go to Ancient Greece and Wonder Woman's there for some reason.

Glen:  What do you mean for some reason? 

Drew:  Wonder Woman's not—not from Ancient Greece. She's from—

Glen:  I mean, it's connected.

Drew:  I mean, it's—it's a—I looked—it's a very weird version of Wonder Woman, but that is technically the first place she ever appeared. Also, why did they go to Ancient Greece? I don't really know. Every episode had them singing a song kind of like Josie and the Pussycats and then that is what resulted in the Brady Kids being a band—sort of—they would release four different albums of them covering popular songs and doing some original stuff like Time to Change.

[“Time to Change” performed by The Brady Bunch plays]

Drew:  There's actually five. There's one album that's just duets between Peter and Marcia. I'm like, “What? Why would that be?”

Glen:  Maybe they're the most talented singers. 

Drew:  Marcia is the best singer. I have no recollection of what Peter's—Christopher Knight's singing voice was. Then there was The Brady Bunch Hour, which aired from November 28, 1976 to May 25, 1977—which is not that long. It is the variety show. It's so weird. Have you ever watched any of it? 

Glen:  No. I saw The Simpsons parody of it. 

Drew:  Right.

Glen:  It's good enough.

Drew:  That is why there's a fake Lisa, because Jan was like, “I don't want to do it,” and they replaced her with Geri Reischl, who I was Myspace friends with back in the day. I'm not sure why exactly but—

Glen:  You probably did it drunk.

Drew:  Probably. Yes. It's super weird because the tensions between Sherwood Schwartz and Robert Reed were so bad that had the show been renewed for a sixth season he—Sherwood Schwartz said he would have fired him, because he just didn't like him on set and thought he was a negative presence. So then the show gets canceled and then shortly after they're back and Robert Reed is doing what is arguably a worse thing because the conceit of the show is that the Brady family that we knew on the show is still playing their characters, but ABC's hired them to host their own variety show for reasons that I'm not sure are ever explained. So they're in character doing the whole thing and it is hokey as fuck to the point that it almost transcends to another level of “Is this art?”

[audience applauds]

Alice:  Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Oh, I see nothing has changed at all. You still can't agree on anything.

Mike:  Alice we're on the air. What are you doing?

Alice:  Same thing I've always done—holding the bunch together. 

[audience laughs] 

Alice:  Let's get this show on the road. 

Greg:  Okay, Alice. What do you want us to do?

Alice:  Since something, dummy. Anything. These kids are so out of it. 

[audience laughs and applauds]

[“The Brady Bunch Variety Hour: Dance Medley” plays]

Drew:  No. It's not. It's really fucking weird. Also, Robert Reed. Gay man, terrible dancer—which I found very comforting because I thought, “Oh. He probably—it's probably that he wanted to sing and dance because that was his thing.” Absolutely not. Terrible fucking dancer, which I found—as a terrible dancing gay man—I found very comforting. 

Glen:  Well, he's a tall man hiding in the closet. Obviously not comfortable in his skin, so no he's not going to be a good dancer.

Drew:  I don't—sometimes, sometimes—

Glen:  I'm sure the last note they would have given him was let loose. 

Drew:  Right. Well. It didn't last for very long, so it came and went but is seared forever in my memory since I watched lots of clips of it. It was also produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, so there's an H.R. Pufnstuf vibe to it that is extra upsetting.

Glen:  So was Robert Reed ever out publicly?

Drew:  No. He passed away in—shortly after A Very Brady Christmas, which I think was his last role of any real note. He died of, I think, rectal cancer—and it's confusing. I don't actually understand why it would have been released in this way, but he was HIV positive when he died, and the doctors said that was a contributing factor. He did not have full blown AIDS when he died, so I don't quite understand exactly how that worked. It was only after that that I think Barry Williams and Florence Henderson started talking about the fact that they all knew he was gay and that they loved him. I think the kids especially had a lot of fondness for their onset dad, but they also knew that this was screwing him up very badly. He had a lot of issues to work through because he couldn't be open, which is very sad. 

Glen:  Especially because he was so handsome. 

Drew:  So fucking handsome. 

Glen:  He's even very handsome in A Very Brady Christmas.

Drew:  He really is. I don't love the curly hair look as much, but he rocks it very nicely with his little Alex Trebek mustache too. After the variety show was canceled the Bradys went dormant for a few years and then came back with The Brady Girls Get Married, which was supposed to be a TV movie but ended up being broken up into half-hour segments and released on a weekly basis as if it were its own series and that proved successful enough that it sprung right into The Brady Brides. 

[“The Brady Brides Theme” plays]

Drew:  This has Jan marrying Philip who is an uptight professor and Marcia marrying Wally who's a kind of sexy bohemian, which you don't really get in A Very Brady Christmas at all, but the two actors who play those husbands come back—which is a nice bit of continuity that you really didn't see that often back then. Yeah. That episode I watched that has Carol spending the night also involved the cops keep coming because there's various disturbances going on because there's no one's getting any sleep and as they explain to the cop what the nature of everyone in the house is he concludes that they're all swingers and it's not raunchy, but it's Three's Company level sexy was clearly what they were going for even though they're all—yeah.

Glen:  The side characters in these later series come at the Bradys with a lot of suspicion as we'll—I have one note on A Very Brady Christmas that just really irked me for some reason.

Drew:  I think I know who you're talking about, but I think that is also reflected in the movie when they are a source of bewilderment to all the people who are not stuck in the '70s like they are. The Brady Brides did not last that long. It lasted a few episodes. It got canceled and then there's nothing until A Very Brady Christmas, which was the segue into The Bradys—which is the hour long sort of drama.

[“The Bradys” performed by Florence Henderson plays]

Drew:  But sort of not. It still has a laugh track, it's just that they don't laugh very often, which is weird because A Very Brady Christmas has no laugh track. It's really off putting and it's like—it almost seems like art in how weird it is but it is the vibe of The Brady Bunch in a world where Marcia battles alcoholism and Bobby is in a race car accident and becomes a paraplegic. 

Glen:  So The Bradys comes after A Very Brady Christmas?

Drew:  Yes. I misidentified that before. So A Very Brady Christmas was hugely successful. It was the second most watched TV movie of 1988. They rebroadcast it as a lead in into The Bradys, which aired the following year and the show did not recapture the magic of this one special and you can watch every episode online now. It is absolutely bizarre, but it's a huge downer because a lot of the tidy resolutions you get in this come apart—like you find out that Jan can't conceive, I believe, and that's hard for her. The woman that Peter ends up getting engaged to? He ditches her in the first episode. 

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  I know. I think they wanted him to be—

Glen:  A swinging bachelor? 

Drew:  Yeah.

Glen:  He's very handsome. 

Drew:  Also we'll talk about Bobby's resolution in a second because it's interesting about what we're going to talk about, but yeah. Also it is established in The Brady Brides that Alice and Sam did get married off screen, which is a very problematic thing for this Christmas special.

Glen:  Oh, my goodness. 

Drew:  In The Bradys Maureen McCormick does not come back and that role is played by Leah Ayres who's the love interest in Bloodsport—which I don't know why I've seen Bloodsport as many times as I have. I watched a lot of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies back in the day. It's really weird to not have Marcia of all of them there, even though Jan sat out the variety show and Cindy sits out the Christmas special. 

Glen:  I think Maureen McCormick actually maintains her Marcia air—her character better than all the other actors. They're still recognizable of who they are, but she just still read heavily as Marcia. 

Drew:  I agree. Perhaps Marcia was not that far from who she actually was.

Glen:  I mean, I loved her in whatever season it was of Celebrity Weight Loss Challenge I watched. 

Drew:  Oh, that's right. She was on that. I forgot about that. 

Glen:  She was lovely. Absolutely lovely.

Drew:  I do know someone that interacted with her in a professional capacity and said she was very nice to work with and surprisingly grounded, which kind of was a surprise because I could also imagine someone who had her life being very scattered, to say the least. Yeah. Susan Olsen does not come back for A Very Brady Christmas, so I guess I'll just talk about her now. She sucks. She fucking sucks. She can go fuck herself because—

Glen:  Whoa. This is the Christmas episode. 

Drew:  I know. So on The Bradys, Cindy becomes a radio host. In real life that's what Susan Olsen actually became, but she was fired from her show when a guest who happened to be a gay fella' published online a rather bracing message that she sent him after he maybe complained about how the interview segment went. This gay guy was on the show and then complained on Facebook and she sent him a note—which I will read in full right now. Coming out of Cindy Brady's mouth—or, I guess, fingers because she was typing but use your imagination: “Hey there, little pussy. Let me get my big-boy pants on and really take you on. What a snake in the grass you are, you lying piece of shit. Too cowardly to confront me in real life, so you do it on Facebook. You're the biggest faggot ass in the world, the biggest pussy. My dick is bigger than yours, which ain't saying much. What a true piece of shit you are, lying faggot. I hope you meet your karma slowly and painfully.”

Glen:  Okay. 

Drew:  She fucking sucks. She turned into a little monster apparently and I do not mind that she sits this one out. The excuse was that she was on her honeymoon.

Glen:  Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  I mean, the actress they got to replace her was lovely.

Drew:  She's great and looks more like Marcia and Jan than Susan Olsen actually ever did.

Glen:  I think I described her to someone before rewatching as dancing a fine line between wholesome and sexy—that they would want for Cindy—this kind of not realistic, perfect college senior.

Drew:  She happens to have played a final girl in a horror movie that came out shortly before this and it's that's energy where you're wholesome but still a little sexy, which is what you want a final girl in a horror movie to be. Have you ever heard of a show called Day by Day? 

Glen:  No.

Drew:  Okay. It was kind of—not—I think it was a—is there a term where it's not a spinoff but we're going to pretend like it's a spinoff and it turns out the dad of this family was Steven Keaton's college roommate, and they use that as a way to shoehorn in a crossover.

Glen:  I just perked up.

Drew:  Yeah. So it takes place in the Family Ties universe. It's called Day by Day and I actually didn't write down who the parents are, but it stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Thora Birch. Aired on NBC from 1988 to '89. You don't remember this?

Glen:  No, but I'm—it sounds like something I would have loved. 

Drew:  They're all online. They did an episode called A Very Brady Episode where the son, Ross, has an extended dream sequence where he is the lost Brady child and it's filmed on the old set and Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Ann B. Davis, Christopher Knight, and Mike Lookinland—played Bobby, and Maureen McCormick all reprise their roles. It's long. They all hang out here for kind of a long time because you got everyone back you kind of have to. Here's the weird thing, Ross is played by Christopher Daniel Barnes who you would know as—who is the voice of Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid.

Glen:  Okay.

Drew:  He was the voice of Spider-Man in the mid-'90s animated Spider-Man that we used to watch, and he played Greg Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie. 

Glen:  Oh!

Drew:  Which is super weird, but I think of that being a little bit of official shared DNA between the real Brady-verse and the movie Brady-verse.

Glen:  Unrelated question—

Drew:  Yeah.

Glen:  But a thought I have. Why do Carol and Mike never have a baby on the show?

Drew:  Because they apparently are fucking all the time. I wondered about that too. 

Glen:  It's just you would have thought—even this epi—A Very Brady Christmas would have been, could have been a time when, “And also in our twenty years of marriage here's now our fifteen-year-old, teenage son,” because they would have been still of childbearing age by the time the show ended.

Drew:  They both entered their second marriage very young. Yeah. It's also interesting considering that in the final season they add Cousin Oliver because they needed a new kid, but I guess they just didn't want to spear it in some baby who magically—like Chrissy Seaver—is into talking very quickly.

Glen:  Chrissy Seaver, the Family Ties Andy—that was his name right? Little Andy?

Drew:  What the fuck is his name? Yeah. Andy sounds right.

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. Ruined Tina Yothers's life. And then there was A Very Brady Renovation that just aired—just a few weeks ago on HGTV which is all about them taking the shell of the exterior that was used in every incarnation of the show and turning it into a functional version of the interior of the set, even though that structure does not make sense given the shape of the house. I think of it as being a weird metaphor for what they did over the show—we're just going to keep wrapping it around stuff and we're going to do whatever we want with it and turn it into another series. All that said, I would watch another version of the show since the six kids are all still alive and were all happy to reunite for A Very Brady Renovation—unless it was just Susan Olsen yelling faggot for a half hour every week. I would not watch that.

Glen:  Well, what station do you think would air that, Drew?

Drew:  [laughs] Oh—I—um—I wouldn't hate.

Glen:  Amazon Prime.

Drew:  Yeah. Alright, all of that's out of the way. Why it's gay—Robert Reed is what everyone would say. Everyone knows that Mr. Brady was secretly gay the entire time. I guess there's not much else to say about his story there, except for the fact that he was nominated for an Emmy for his appearance on Medical Center where he played a man—a doctor—who comes out as transgender. We will watch this one day and find out exactly how cringeworthy it is—or maybe not. Maybe it holds up rather well, but I like to think of that as being a nice coda for his career, being like, “I'm going to do weird progressive stuff. I don't really care.” I guess he felt like he didn't have anything to lose trying to rebound from being Mr. Brady. Florence in her own way sort of a gay icon in that she sang a lot of show tunes and I think she embraced a certain  weird campiness that got attached to her later on. Do you remember her cameo in 30 Rock where she gets trapped in an elevator with Tracy and I think Kenneth and then they offscreen murder her? She just had a weird sense of humor about it, and she seemed to embrace—she seemed to talk very kindly about Robert Reed and about how it was tough for him to be closeted his entire career and I think that might be why a lot of gay men in particular thought, “Oh, she gets it. She's an ally. We're going to support her.”

Glen:  Also and I think we talked about this earlier this week about our affinity for The Brady Bunch and why other gay men sort of clung to it and that the problems on the show are all very—they're sweet, but they're also dealt with in the open, like the kids have a problem—they either tell each other or tell their parents and it's tackled, whereas when we were younger we couldn't necessarily go to our siblings or our parents with our boy or girl trouble and other things that we're feeling and also we were probably a lot of us alienated from our siblings in some ways and so to see this tight knit family is just like, “Oh, well. I'm just going to digest this and maybe this is what real families are like.”

Drew:  I'm sure more than a few people had weird fantasies about running away and joining the Bradys, specifically because you literally could go to Mike and Carol with anything and they probably would have been understanding. You could be like, “Mike and Carol, I killed someone. What do I do?” and they would talk you through the best possible solution to disposing the body. I'm sure.

Glen:  Especially because for each parent half of the kids aren't their biological kids. They're taking kids that are not—quote/unquote—theirs and loving them equally to their own biological children.

Drew:  Yeah. They gel up into a cohesive family unit that calls the other parent mom and dad very, very quickly.

Glen:  Yeah. And even—we'll probably mention it when we start talking about the actual—A Very Brady Christmas, Jan's an architect. 

Drew:  Yeah.

Glen:  None of Mike's kids—none of Mike's sons become an architect. It is Jan who sort of inherits his mantle, which I think was a sweet little note. 

Drew:  Marcia becomes a mom like Carol, and she's a good singer. It's not as remarkable. I'm glad that they made Jan an architect for that character's evolution into—that character's evolution into adulthood. Her husband is much older than her. It doesn't really read in A Very Brady Christmas as much, but they met when she was in college and—

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  He was her professor.

Glen:  Ooh. I don't like that. 

Drew:  It's kind of who—Jan is—

Glen:  Absolutely who Jan would marry.

Drew:  She's sharp and saucy from adulthood on. She's like, “I'm back. There's not fake Jan anymore, but we're going to make this—we're going to make this me.” I think of all of them she's the one who it would be fun to get a drink with, because I think she has a good sense of humor about everything and probably has really good stories. 

Glen:  I mean, yeah. She epitomized Middle Child Syndrome in a way that Peter didn't because Marcia was perfect and because Cindy was the baby of all of them it just—those were the two tent poles that Jan sort of fell between. 

Drew:  I agree. There's one more reason why the show is gay. So it's interesting because it was our recent houseguest Jeff. Jeff Hinchee—artist—was talking about Brady Bunch and talking about how you could talk to your parents about anything and that being one of the reasons it might appeal to gay audiences and that's true and it's like an assembled family in the way that Golden Girls is. They're not all biologically related, but they're going to work together and work as a unit and that's a great model for gay people to assemble their own families. Then there's Alice. Alice is a really interesting, complicated subject when you think about who she is and what she is on that show. She's—I mean—she's not unfeminine or feminine.

Glen:  I mean, she always read butch older to me on the show for some reason and so she always felt like a grandma to me, which because of in our culture is inherently sort of—inherently sort of sexless and kind of removed but also a very close knit part of the family who has opinions but no one's going to listen to them and—yeah—it's weird—she is clearly a part of the family but her—it is hard to sort of make sense of her personal life other than she has Sam and that's sort of—she changes out of the uniform to date Sam who's also sort of—he's a butcher sort of painted as a domestic player. 

Drew:  Also he's a butcher. They give her a love interest who is butcher than she is. It's almost there doesn't quite work, but—

Glen:  No I think as someone who loves reach arounds I think that's a reach around.

Drew:  It's a very interesting thing, Ann B. Davis herself never married, never had a romantic interest that we know of, and there's a few quotes from cast members after she passed away saying, “Yeah we didn't really ever talk about her personal life at all. She was great to work with and she was like a member of the family. She just didn't really talk about herself.” I looked up what her character was like on The Bob Cummings Show where she played Schultzy. It's kind of Alice by way of [Ira Bolen 00:37:55] where she's younger, but it's not really a gendered character, and I can't speculate what was actually going on with Ann after Brady Bunch ended. She moved out of LA and lived in Colorado with an Episcopal community that was inclusive. There was—someone talked to the minister who was in charge of the community, and he said, “Some people had a family, some people are single, some people are gay we accepted everyone.” That's what he said. She might have been a closeted lesbian and there is actually—again it's interesting because of what Jeff was talking about—he was talking about the rumor that Carol Stanwyck was maybe a lesbian. Have you ever heard of a person named Boze Hadleigh?

Glen:  Sure. 

Drew:  He's a gay journalist who traffics in a lot of gossip and rumor and he had a—

Glen:  That's so unlike a gay journalist. 

Drew:  I know. He has—he wrote a piece about basically pissing off Ann B. Davis and Barbara Stanwyck separately, but he links them in the piece because they were two interviews where he floated the specter of lesbianism and they had very different reactions. Barbara Stanwyck gave him what's for. She was not going to let him suggest that she might be anything other than heterosexual. Ann B. Davis simply was like, “I think I hear the doorbell. I have to go,” and hung up on him and some people say that it was known that Ann B. Davis was a lesbian, but there's literally no proof of it one way or the other. But when everyone thinks about Mr. Brady it's weird that they overlook the fact that there is this quirky, quippy member of the family who by the way has the exact cadence of Ellen DeGeneres which is really weird if you just hear Alice's voice on her own—sometimes she even sort of makes an Ellen face when she's talking—very, very odd. 

Glen:  Well, she definitely has that sort of nervous energy in A Very Brady Christmas. 

Drew:  Yeah, because her life is ending and she's probably having some sort of mental breakdown.

Glen:  Yeah. Probably. 

Drew:  Yeah. So that's—that's my overview of what is broadly gay about The Brady Bunch and there's some more stuff we're going to get into when we're talking about the rest of the episode but—

Glen:  Which we'll do.

Drew:  Yes.

Glen:  After—

Drew:  After what? 

Glen:  A break. 

[“The Brady Bunch” plays]

[Gayest Episode Ever promotes A Love Bizarre]

Drew:  We had exactly one new patron pledge money in the last week and the rules of our Patreon say that when someone gives three dollars or more a month they get a thank you on air and a randomly selected compliment from the box of compliments which again Glen is not here to select so I guess I'll just get it myself like some kind of idiot. To Rob Sinclair—our new patron—I say, “Thank you. You are more joyous than Betty White driving a van full of newly adopted cats and dogs.” That's a pretty good one I think. Thank you. If you would like to give either Glen or I a Christmas present I say you can go to Patreon.com/GayestEpisodeEver or if you'd rather spend those dollars elsewhere because it is the season you could also do us a solid by giving us a rate and review on Apple Podcasts, formerly known as iTunes. Even if you use some other podcast listening app, Apple Podcasts is unfortunately the cruel arbiter of fate, success, and doom so please go to the link I'm providing in the show notes—at the very top of the show notes so you can't miss it—and give us a rate and review. It can be short, it can be weird, it can be anything, but the written review counts for more than just a five-star review so please get on that. No, like really do it right now. While you're doing that I'll read some of the more recent reviews we've gotten. I realize we've been lax in reading these lately but hear what three nice people had to say about us. Joshy V  recently said in part, “The great trivia and historical context from Drew plus witty analysis from Glen comes together to reveal a podcast that's both entertaining and a great look at LGBTQ+ history through the lens of pop culture.” Thank you, Joshy. JLM1955 wrote, “The overall polish and production of the podcast are enough to keep you listening week after week and it's the historical context and nuanced perspective that really set this podcast apart.” Thank you. And then thirdly and finally KaisoAudio said that in part, “Drew is very considerate of the opinions and observations expressed by Glen and the excellent guests they bring on. While Glen brings a snarky attitude along with thoughtful interjections to balance-slash-derail the podcast, Drew attempts to keep it moving and goes to many interesting places.” Thank you, I think that is a very perceptive review. I appreciate you pointing out those qualities. So yes, if you didn't while I was reading those—right now please go to iTunes and give us five stars and some number of words and you would be doing a lot to help out this podcast. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going back to my favorite holiday pastime—going through Glen's cabinets and judging his character by what I find in there. What a lonely, grey afternoon. 

 [“The Brady Bunch” plays]

Glen:  And we're back. 

Drew:  Hi. A Very Brady Christmas starts out with Mike and Carol wearing really slim and workout jumpsuits.

Glen:  Yeah. What workout outfit needs shoulder pads? I wonder.

Drew:  I'm sure there is an outfit for a woman of a certain age, at a certain time where that was an absolute prerequisite. They got each other these exercise bikes for Christmas last year and they just love them. They're in really good shape.

Mike:  I have to get dressed. 

Carol:  Sweetheart, remember we don't have any kids at home anymore and I don't have to go to business at the real estate office today and you don't have to go to business either so I thought maybe you and I could do some business together here. 

Mike:  You tempt me. You really do.

Carol:  [laughs]

Drew:  And then it breaks into Carol wanting to know what's going on with Christmas this year.

Glen:  You know I think it's maybe September or August. The timeline of this special is sort of iffy because it all comes together kind of quickly.

Drew:  It does. It seems like it might be three days, but that can't possibly be true.

Glen:  They say a few months ago.

Drew:  Oh. Okay.

Glen:  Later in the episode it was like, “Oh, when we were planning to go to either Tokyo or Greece.

Drew:  Greece. Greece where homosexuality was invented.

Glen:  After the discussion, when the camera takes—

Drew:  A tour of the house?

Glen:  A tour—a luxurious tour of the house and I might say that the '80s are the tenth member of the Brady clan in this special.

Drew:  I would agree. It is gorgeous. 

Glen:  Well.

Drew:  I think it is like what late '80s, upper-middle-class housing would have looked like.

Glen:  Oh, yes. 

Drew:  And to me, that's what I think nice, is and I'll probably always think that, and I would live in that house. I thought it was gorgeous. It is—

Glen:  Everything's off-white.

Drew:  Yes.

Glen:  And even the—quote/unquote—colors look like they were left out in the Arizona sun for months. Everything's very muted. I'm sure the flowers are silk flowers and not real flowers. There's crystal all over the place. The couches are poufy. 

Drew:  I think they did a really good job updating what the original set looked like for what it would look like in 1988. For me it was very inspirational. If you come back from Christmas and the entire house looks like that, then you'll know why. And then after all that, the house is the eighth member of the Brady bunch in this case. 

Glen:  Wait. You say tenth because Alice is the ninth.

Drew:  Oh, right. Okay. I can't count.

Glen:  I mean—there's a grid. It's a three-by-three grid. 

Drew:  Oh. Right, right, right. I don't know who I was thinking of then.

Glen:  Alice. 

Drew:  No, I said, “Eighth,” so I was leaving two other people out. 

Glen:  Oh. 

Drew:  Anyway. Then you find out that there's this whole dueling vacation thing because both Brady parents call both sets of children and talk about what's going on with Christmas this year. 

Glen:  It's not a bad way to quickly set up all the children and where they are.

Drew:  I think it's rather elegant because you see Carol on the phone and she's having the same conversation on her end, and it starts alternating between the different kids on the other end and you see enough glimpse of all of their lives to get a good idea of what's going on.

Glen:  Given all the long-distance conversations in this special you might say that the telephone is the tenth member of the Brady clan.  

Drew:  I specifically enjoy Marcia's giant telephone, because—

Glen:  That looked like a panda, but that's just how it is.

Drew:  Kind of, yeah. It's just large and black and white and yeah. Let's talk about Marcia. Actually let's talk about one of the reasons I think this has a little bit of a gay appeal and I think it's that perhaps accidentally it gives the idea that traditional, nuclear family life is kind of toxic because all the kids are encountering struggles in their own way the only people who are extremely happy the way things are now are Mike and Carol who seem to not really have much stress besides Mike's building kerfuffle. 

Glen:  Yeah. Cindy and Bobby are also happy because they are young and single. 

Drew:  Because they're not part of—yeah, they don't—

Glen:  Domestic turmoil.

Drew:  Yeah. They've struck out on their own and they're doing their own thing. So I understand that that's the way they would write this because you have to set up problems and have them be solved and no one wants to see Mike and Carol going through stress, but Marcia's life does not seem that that great. Her children are monsters.

[children fighting]

Marcia:  Stop squirting it at your sister. 

Mickey:  I've got to get Jessica wet.

Marcia:  You don't have to get her wet.

Mickey:  Yes, I do.

Jessica:  Mom, make him stop. 

Marcia:  Mickey do you remember when you put chewing gum in your sister's sneakers? No TV for a whole week. 

Mickey:  This is worth it. 

Drew:  Horrible little monsters both of them.

Glen:  Well, what did the little girl do wrong?

Drew:  She's really annoying. 

Glen:  Okay. I mean, she's not the aggressor in this situation. Her younger brother the terror is chasing her and shooting her with water. What do you want her to do?

Drew:  I don't know, not exist. I didn't—I don't—I don't enjoy other people's—

Glen:  Let's just at this point say that we are blessed that between the six Brady children there are only three grandchildren. 

Drew:  Yes.

Glen:  We only have to deal with three children in this hour and a half long special. I was happy.

Drew:  You see Wally come home. Wally has lost his job. 

Marcia:  Honey, did something happen at work this afternoon? 

Wally:  I don't know. I wasn't at work this afternoon. They let me go this morning.

Marcia:  The Tyler Toy Company fired you? 

Wally:  That's right. I won't be going there tomorrow or ever.

Mickey:  Great. Now all of us can play with toys.

Jessica:  Daddy doesn't like that word anymore.

Wally:  I mean, I gave them my best. I established markets they never had before. Then there's a merger and a consolidation and I'm gone. 

Marcia:  You're a great salesman, honey. You'll get another job.

Wally:  Fine, but until then where do we get the money to live on? We hardly have anything in the bank. 

Drew:  So that's her stress. Her husband's kind of a loser and her kids are both monsters. There I said it.

Glen:  Well also, I mean, Wally has a very not pleasant energy about him and goes on to complain about, “We're going to lose our house. We're going to lose our life. We're going to not have any money. We have no money,” and then the kid's like, “Well, what's going to happen?” And he's like, “I don't want you to worry about it.” Like, you just melted down in front of your children. This was supposed to be a conversation you had with Marcia away from the children. Children should never have to worry about monetary stress. They will feel the effects of it, but you want to keep those conversations away from them unless it's time for the family to make a decision which they're going to have to do at some point.

Drew:  Mike and Carol would have known not to have that conversation in front of the kids.

Glen:  They have it right before sex. 

Drew:  They do. We're still going down the family—oh yeah, that's the second time they had sex. They had—I think they imply twice in here that they have relations which is good for them. Then we see Greg. Greg is rocking a pornstache, which is another one of the gay things in this movie. I love moustache Greg. I think he's better looking than he was when he was younger actually. He's also an OBGYN. 

Glen:  He is also married to his nurse, and he will not be the only Brady boy to be having work relations—problematic work relations.

Drew:  Cindy does it in this series too. 

Glen:  Great.

Drew:  She dates her much older boss who has kids her own age. 

Glen:  I get it. You have limited time to establish characters and you want to establish Greg's job at the same time as Greg's marriage so you might as well have them work together. 

Drew:  So we're going to collapse a few of the scenes before Greg gets there now, but his whole thing is that the resolution of the whole confusion about which trip Mike and Carol are going to take ends with the entire family being invited to the Brady home for Christmas this year and Greg's wife is kind of being a pill.

Glen:  Unreasonable. 

Drew:  Yeah. She's being a pill about it.

Nora:  My folks invited us for Christmas.

Greg:  I know, but we went to your folks last year and the year before that.

Nora:  So. Christmas together is a tradition in my family.

Greg:  Yeah, but this is the first time in years all the kids will be together.

Nora:  But I already promised Mom and Dad.

Greg:  Wally and Marcia will be at the folks with Jessica and Mickey, so Kevin will have cousins to play with.

Nora:  If we're talking cousins, Tom and Tricia will be there with all five of their kids. 

Greg:  We saw them last year.

Nora:  That doesn't mean I don't want to see them this year.

Drew:  They've gone—they've spent the past few Christmases with her family wherever the fuck in the country they are and he's like, “All nine of us are going to be back and that almost never happens so I'd like to go,” and she's like, “My Aunt Francis. I want to spend time with her.” I was like, “Who cares?”

Glen:  Yeah. She is absolutely—I was so angry at her. I was like, “What? You obviously understand your husband comes from a very special family situation and to have the entire family back for the first time in who knows how long,” and also yeah the last two Christmases were with your family. Usually it's every other is how I am to understand it, so just do it you awful, awful woman.

Drew:  Also their child is apparently objectionable although it's not really well demonstrated why Kevin is the slug as the—

Glen:  That's the other gay thing about this episode. Kevin is clearly the gay child because he is particular and polite and easily bullied by his loud, aggressively masculine cousin. 

Drew:  In the series, Kevin is played by Jonathan Taylor Thomas. 

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  I think right before Home Improvement actually. He's a little fancy boy and his cousins dislike him, but for really no reason. He's not shown to be awful in any way. 

Glen:  No.

Drew:  Third we have Jan. Jan—

Glen:  She looks great.

Drew:  She looks amazing. She looks like—

Glen:  She's wearing a jewel toned wrap dress suit thing with a fabulous pin. 

Drew:  Just around her living room. She's not out and about. That's just what she'd wear in her own house. 

Glen:  She could have come home from work. She is an architect.

Drew:  She is, but she looks amazing. I'm most envious of her life except that her marriage is falling apart because I don't think it's really specified why, but her and Philip have grown apart since The Brady Brides.

Glen:  They've grown cold. 

Jan:  Are you almost done?

Philip:  I'm moving my things out with as much alacrity as I can. I'd move out even more alacritically if I could.

Jan:  Good. 

[phone rings] 

Jan:  Hello. 

Carol:  Hi, Jan. 

Jan:  Oh, hi Mom. 

Carol:  Didn't you get my messages? 

Jan:  Uh yes, but we've been very busy. 

Carol:  How's Philip? 

Jan:  Oh, fine. 

Carol:  Let me say hi to him. 

Jan:  Alright. It's my mother. Say hello. 

Philip:  Hi, Mom. 

Carol:  Hi, Philip. You sound out of breath. 

Philip:  I've been exercising [laughs].

Carol:  Good. Keep on doing what you're doing.

Philip:  I plan to.

Drew:  He's literally leaving and she's being mean about it but because it's Eve Plumb she does a very good job. I would actually say that Jan—Jan—Eve Plumb has maybe had the best career of the six kids outside of The Brady Bunch—outside of The Brady Bunch where they're playing roles that are actual acting roles and not stunt casted for being the people they are in real life. Marcia's done okay. She was in—have you ever seen Return to Horror High? She plays a female cop who gets off on bloodshed and it's—

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  But it's funny. It's not played as serious. It's played as campy and weird, and she actually gets it and she's not bad in that. Eve Plumb is in this Dawn:   Portrait of a Teen Runaway.

Glen:  That's famous. 

Drew:  And I saw some clips from it. She's not bad. She's done some cool stuff. She was the mom in Fudge. Remember there was a TV version of Fudge? She also plays a butch prisoner at a—in a women's prison set episode of Murder, She Wrote. I'm like, “Is that Jan Brady? Oh, she's good. I like her. Okay.” She turned around in that one. 

Glen:  Your dog just farted. 

Drew:  You don't know that. Then there's Peter. Peter is dating his boss and they're—

Glen:  She has a fabulous late '80s office.

Drew:  Yes. In the desert? 

Glen:  Pink or mauve. I thought it was either in the desert or those were just large, large portraits of cactuses, which I'm having Look Who's Talking flashbacks where Kirstie Alley's boss has a Mohave Desert theme to his office or something and I think that the ladies were just very into deserts. 

Drew:  Deserts and Australia, which kind of makes sense.

Glen:  And she has one of those sexual harassment buttons under her desk.

Drew:  Oh, totally. For sure. 

Glen:  Yeah. Peter enters and she pushes a button under her desk and the door closes behind him. 

Drew:  Oh, I did not even realize that's what was—I thought you were making a joke. I thought you were making a joke.

Glen:  She has a sexual harassment button.

Drew:  She's having an illicit affair with her subordinate. She probably has to be very careful about that. Her whole thing is like, “I want to meet your family,” and he's like, “No. I don't want you to,” because he's embarrassed that she's more powerful than he is which is fucked up. 

Valerie:  I can't help it if I'm your boss, Peter. And that only bothers me because it bothers you and it shouldn't sweetheart. From nine to five I may be the boss, but from five to nine—

Peter:  I am. 

Valerie:  [laughs] I'd say it's about even. Right?

Peter:  Right. 

Valerie:  Relationships are about two people not two—

Peter:  Valerie—

Valerie:  What? 

Drew:  Get over yourself.

Glen:  That is his only problem throughout this episode special and it gets resolved obviously.

Drew:  Then we check in on Cindy. 

Glen:  We're not going to talk about how the actor who plays Peter is—remains handsome and married I believe the first winner of America's Next Top Model.

Drew:  And they met on the set of Surreal Life. He got out of acting. He went into computer business and made some money there and then ended up back in TV to be on The Surreal Life and then he's never left. They had that show, My Fair Brady is another in the—

Glen:  Brady-verse?

Drew:  Yeah. He's married to someone else now. He's pretty good looking. Yeah, wouldn't have guessed he would have been the looker of the three boys, but it turns out he is. Valerie is his love interest. She was on—remember they keep talking about that show, The Charmings?

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  She played Snow White on that, which makes sense. She has that face. Then we have Cindy.

Mike:  It's hard to believe. To us you're still our little girl. 

Cindy:  Yeah. I guess I am. 

Mike:  Well, we'll see you at Christmas then.

Cindy:  Okay. 

Mike:  Bye.

Cindy:  Bye. 

Belinda:  I can't believe I just overheard what I just overheard.  

Cindy:  Yeah, well—you shouldn't have been listening.

Belinda:  You're not going skiing with the rest of us, right?

Cindy:  Well, look Belinda my folks want me to come home.

Belinda:  And you're going? You're giving up a trip with the whole gang? Come on Cindy you're an adult. The state recognizes it. Why can't your parents? 

Cindy:  I'm the youngest. I mean, everybody just always assumes that I'm going to go along with everything.

Drew:  Who is played by Jennifer Runyon who played Gwendolyn on Charles in Charge.

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  That's who she—I don't remember who Gwendolyn was.

Glen:  Was that not his main girlfriend?

Drew:  She might have been. It's just I don't really remember. 

Glen:  Maybe not. I just—his main girlfriend was—I mean, how many episodes was she in? 

Drew:  She was on a few seasons, and I think she was opening cast, opening credits.

Glen:  Oh. 

Drew:  She was in Charles in Charge. She was also in Carnosaur?

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  Which I never really thought about the fact that Carnosaur stars Laura Dern's mom. 

Glen:  I didn't think about that either. That's not really the most standout thing about Carnosaur.

Drew:  It is though because you consider it is a movie made just to make money on the back of Jurassic Park and they cast Laura Dern's mom in the lead role.

Glen:  Oh, yeah. I guess. Yes. Yes. Yes.  

Drew:  That's weird right? And then she was also in this movie I'd never heard of before called To All a Good Night --is a Santa themed slasher movie.

Glen:  Oh, you'd love that.

Drew:  Yeah. I wrote that Susan Olsen was too busy yelling slurs at gay people. I also wrote that—in case you're wondering Susan Olsen played a pile of soiled rags in an episode of The Love Boat and she also played a cancerous corpse on an episode of Medical Center. 

Glen:  I look forward to this podcast getting sued. 

Drew:  It's clearly parody.

Glen:  Yeah. Sure.

Drew:  Yeah. Question about Cindy. So Cindy is graduating college which makes her about twenty-two? So The Brady Bunch started in 1969 at which point Cindy's six or seven, so that means she's twenty-five or twenty-six and she's hanging out with people who seem like they're eighteen and she's boy crazy, but it's like, “You're almost thirty and you're pretending to be—”

Glen:  I didn't think about that. That's very weird, because they make a point that they just had the twenty-year anniversary, so this takes place twenty years after the pilot and she was at least five in that.

Drew:  Apparently, the Schwartz family cannot do math.

Glen:  Hey, maybe she took a gap few years. 

Drew:  [laughs] Several years.

Glen:  Hey, there's nothing—actually there is nothing wrong with having some life experience before going onto undergrad not everyone makes use of their undergraduate degree at the age that we are pressured to go to college, so I applaud Cindy for figuring out that college was something she wanted to do and going to it when she was responsible and settled although yes, she appears to live in a dorm room.

Drew:  She's acting like an eighteen-year-old. 

Glen:  Yes.

Drew:  Yeah. That is something that just popped into my mind before recording. I'm like, “Wait a minute.” And then we come to Bobby, which is our big gay plotline.

Glen:  Yes. Bobby who is practicing racing cars for race car driving and that is sort of his storyline and when you wanted to do A Very Brady Christmas for a Christmas special this year I immediately said yes specifically because of the Bobby storyline which I think is a big ole gay metaphor. 

Howie:  What was that you said about the library? 

Bobby:  Oh, that was my dad. He thinks I'm studying for my exams in business administration. 

Howie:  You mean they don't know you dropped out of graduate school?

Bobby:  Not yet. They'd be worried to death if they knew I wanted to be a race car driver. 

Howie:  When you going to tell them? 

Bobby:  When the time is right. Maybe after I win the Indy 500. 

Howie:  Hey that could be years away. 

Bobby:  Meanwhile, they won't worry. 

Glen:  I think that race car driving exciting and dangerous is a metaphor for being gay because it's something he will not tell his family about because they think it is too dangerous.

Drew:  If he wins the Indy 500 then I guess he'll have to tell them but—

Glen:  That's like me coming out late because I was like, “Oh I'll tell my parents I'm gay when I'm in a relationship, because then I'll be a happy gay,” which is just fucked up.

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah that's—Bobby fairly cute actually. It's weird seeing him with his natural hair color. They allowed him to not dye his hair dark, but he—

Glen:  His hair was dyed for the show?

Drew:  Until the end you see his natural hair color in the final season and it's not as dark as it always was. I actually found a note that said they made him dye his hair and it was this goopy dye that would melt under the studio lights so he'd have black streaks running down his face and he'd have to wash up and he hated doing it so as the show went on he's like, “Can I please not do this?” and they were like, “Okay. Fine.” And let him out of it, so he's naturally sandy blonde.

Glen:  That is crazy. 

Drew:  Yeah. Bobby's played by Mike Lookinland who did some stuff. He worked behind the scenes on Halloween four and five, but at some point he was like, “I don't want to be in Hollywood anymore,” and he runs a concrete business in Utah now, which is probably the best choice someone can make when, “I don't want to fucking live in Hollywood anymore. I don't want to do that.” Okay. So the parents have discussed the dueling vacation plans with all the kids. And now this—

Glen:  How that—we—I just want to know how the dueling vacation plotline gets resolved. It is a half hour of this special. It is baffling, but they just go to the travel agency which ha-ha travel agents although you just used one when you went to Japan didn't you. 

Drew:  I did. Thank you Sachiko. 

Glen:  So they're both at the travel agency and Carol finds out from her travel agent that their special travel savings account is drained, and instead of the travel agent jumping to the logical conclusion of, “Oh. Well, the other person on this account—your husband—must have taken the money out for some reason. You should probably call your husband and see what's up before we assume anything wildly illogical." Like, the fact that the travel agent believes that Carol Brady is scamming her and has given her this check that would immediately bounce and just thinks she's a crook of some sort. 

Mrs. Crane:  It seems that you have a balance of eight dollars and seventeen cents in your special account. 

Carol:  Oh, that's impossible. That's our special savings account. That's the money for our cruise to Greece. 

Mrs. Crane:  Well, thanks for stopping by Mrs. Brady, if that's your name. 

Drew:  Yeah that's weird and she also doesn't apologize for it when it is revealed that Mike is talking to his travel agent one cubic wall—cubical wall over—and they're like, “Can you imagine? Mr. Brady, Mrs. Brady?” And then they probably have sex. 

Glen:  Yeah. I already forgot the woman travel agent's name, but I hated her. 

Drew:  Mrs. Crane.

Glen:  Yeah. Mrs. Crane.

Drew:  Yeah.

Glen:  There's a whole set up for her character just to make her awful and I just wanted to talk about her because I hate her.

Drew:  There's a cut away to her when Mike and Carol hug, and she's smiling, and it's like, "You should say 'I'm sorry' for accusing Carol of being a fraudster. But it resolves and then their solution is why don't we just spend all the money on bringing all the kids home and then all the kids debate whether or not they're going to do this, and they all eventually do which has consequences that are the bulk of the movie. Around this time Alice shows up. Alice is sad.

Carol:  Alice. 

Mike:  Alice. What a happy surprise. 

Alice:  [cries] 

Carol:  So Sam walked out without saying goodbye?

Alice:  No Mrs. Brady, my husband left me a note written on paper from his butcher shop. 

Mike:  Dear Alice, I lied to you. I wasn't working nights plucking chickens. I met a younger woman. At first we just traded meatloaf recipes, then one night she asked me over to season her rump roast. The next parts kind of blurred. 

Alice:  That's my tears.

Mike:  I guess I'm an old fool, but I fell for her like a pound of ground chuck.

Drew:  Sir, restrain yourself. You're talking to your wife of at least twenty something years—no less than that—but you're talking to your wife of at least a decade and it's weird that they couldn't think of any other reason for Alice to go spend time with Mike and Carol other than Sam leaving her for another woman.

Glen:  Wait, Sam dying would have been too sad. 

Drew:  I guess so.

Glen:  But then they would have to deal with the logistics of—I don't know—I guess he could have died, and it could have unraveled that, “Oh, I found out that Sam lost all of our money blah, blah, blah.” I don't know why she would have moved out of their house though and in with the Bradys if Sam was the one who cheated on her. Sam should leave. 

Drew:  I believe she's living with Sam in their own place during The Brady Brides, because she lives near them and Alice pops in fairly often. I don't think Sam ever shows up on Brady Brides though, but he's still around. So basically they have to punish Alice and make her very sad to get her back in the house with Mike and Carol who treat her like family, but perhaps it's a result of some psychosis she immediately puts on her maid's uniform and starts doing chores around the house. I'm just like, “Oh, this poor woman. I feel very sad for her.”

Glen:  I don't know if that uniform was just hanging there or if she packed it because she does come with her suitcases packed to move in with them.

Drew:  Right. Do you think that Mike and Carol put it out on the bed and were like, “Let's see if she wears it,” and then she just—

Glen:  It's funny, though, because and this relates to the Cindy plotline that when I go home to be with my family I absolutely fall into old bad habits of how I acted and how I was treated as a child. Like with my dad, I will go from zero to ten very quickly—much more quickly than I will with friends or professional people, and it is hard to escape family dynamics. So, Ann B. Davis.

Drew:  It was probably comforting her to go into a safe environment after she lost her new life so I guess that makes sense, but you are watching a woman—

Glen:  Unravel. 

Drew:  What's worse is that once everyone agrees to come home, including Sidney—Cindy who's not importantly never asked if she wants to come home. They just assume that since everyone else is coming home she will give up her sexy ski weekend with her roommate. Her roommate by the way is Lisa Turtle by way of Ashley Banks.

Glen:  Yeah. I was—I would have described her similarly.

Drew:  And she's just like, “Okay. I guess I have to because I'm the baby. I don't have a choice about stuff.” Again nuclear family is toxic. Alice is—her first major task is to go to LAX and collect all six of the children.

Glen:  What a nightmare.

Drew:  I was like—

Glen:  What a nightmare. 

Drew:  When they pull up though there's no traffic there and I was like, “That's not LAX, like, ever.” It's beautiful.

Glen:  Are we sure it wasn't Burbank Airport? 

Drew:  It's LAX. I'm sure. You'll find out tomorrow when you go there.

Glen:  I will.

Drew:  Poor Alice. That seems like a miserable task and there's a long montage of her finding the kids one by one.

Glen:  I actually like this montage cutting Alice at the airport picking up all the different kids with the parents getting the house ready to have everyone sleep there, getting all the sleeping bags, the beds. It's like—yeah. I'm about to be sleeping under a dining room table for two weeks so—

Drew:  Like Thurman. 

Glen:  Yeah. Just like Thurman. So families are like, "Yeah. This is how it works around the holidays," and I thought there was a very—I don't know if it was intentional. But when she goes to get Cindy from the gate she approaches the wrong young, blonde woman getting off the plane thinking that it's Cindy—because Cindy is not played by the original actress.

Drew:  I believe it is intentional because there's that thing where Bobby also walks right past Cindy and Alice but doesn't recognize them. They have to grab him and be like, “Doofus, it's us.” Yeah. I feel like given all the stress she was going through part of that montage should have just been Alice sitting in the airport and just weeping [laughs] quietly but no we are led to believe that she enjoys this horrendous task of driving to the airport I'm going to say bare minimum three times, probably more times. But then everyone gets there around the same time, so I don't understand how that time works. She wasn't driving a bus—unless they made her drive a bus.

Glen:  Maybe. 

Drew:  Poor Alice. So everyone gets there.

Glen:  She has all their lug—all of their luggage so it was one trip to get all of them. All of their planes landed somewhat near each other. I guess once she got one child she made them wait in the van while she got the others. 

Drew:  [laughs] The bus. There's not a van that can fit that many people. 

Glen:  Peter's the only one who lives within driving distance. I find that baffling. 

Drew:  Oh that's extra weird because when the show happens everyone's right there. Greg no longer lives far away. Same wife—the—his nurse wife comes back. 

Glen:  Oh, I hate her.

Drew:  Same actress too. Yeah.

Glen:  So once everyone's in the house it all moves rather quickly. Apparently they arrive on Christmas Eve. I don't know why you would go through the trouble of having this big family reunion to have everyone arrive on Christmas Eve and probably leave—I don't know—the day after Christmas. It seems like a lot of hassle for not a lot of whatever and they immediately after all the greeting—which is sweet, I got a little choked up seeing everyone reunite in the living room for the first time.

Drew:  Do you think it was weird for the actress who played Cindy being like, “Hey, it's good to see you.”?

Glen:  No because you know the spouses are there and they're new too. 

Drew:  Yeah. I guess some of them are new, but yeah most of those people knew each other which would be a weird thing. It would be weird to stand there and be like, “Huh.”

Glen:  But a lot happens on this day. I know if I—on a big travel day, nothing happens that first day, but they immediately go to cooking Christmas dinner. Well the girls cook Christmas dinner, and the boys go get the Christmas tree. So the cooking of Christmas dinner and the fetching of and decorating of the Christmas tree all happen at once along with the unpacking and everything.

Drew:  And then they sing.

Glen:  And that's one of the standout memories I have from the Very Brady Christmas of the women coming in from the kitchen with cookies and eggnog and such singing and then the men singing the masculine part with the Christmas tree. I thought it was very charming how the granddaughter fell in line even though she—I don't think she had anything to do with the cooking. She was just there, but yes nuclear families are toxic -- this upper middle class-slash-affluent white family with their privilege and their lifestyle and just sort of the fact that—not to get political again—but the pushing of Christmas as this dominant cultural milestone in America is just so gross because yes it's about family but it's also about capitalism and not—most people cannot afford to have this experience and we haven't even talked about how very few people of color appear in this movie.

Drew:  There's Bobby's mechanic. There's Cindy's roommate.

Glen:  There's a cop—a mean looking cop. 

Drew:  That might be it. There's not a lot—there are not many. To their credit on The Bradys Jan and Philip adopt a—I think a girl from Korea. 

Glen:  Okay.

Drew:  So there is a non-white person who becomes part of The Brady Bunch family. Maybe the takeaway from the movie is that the nuclear family is toxic and grinds people down but Mike and Carol are somehow magic because they solve everyone's problems basically.

Glen:  Well, they're also a blended family so they've at least broken out of that.

Drew:  Essentially, everyone talks and sorts through their problems. I really like the scene when Bobby comes out to Peter as a race car driver. It really sells your theory about it being a gay metaphor. 

Bobby:  Peter, can I talk to you?

Peter:  Sure. 

Bobby:  I mean, really talk.

Peter:  Yeah. What's up?

Bobby:  I'm not in school anymore.

Peter:  What? Mom and Dad are always telling me how well you're doing in school.

Bobby:  They don't know. 

Peter:  When did you drop out? 

Bobby:  A year ago. 

Peter:  Are you racing cars? 

Bobby:  Yep. I know Mom and Dad would think it was too dangerous. They want me in business school adding assets and debits.

Peter:  When are you going to tell them.

Bobby:  That's a big decision. I kind of wanted your advice.

Glen:  No. I mean, the scene is also sweet because he talks—Bobby talks Peter through his dumb issue. It's pretty much just that night and morning—the next morning that everyone just works through whatever small plotlines they have. We don't have to get into all the resolutions. I did want to bring up because it baffled and irritated me that there's a scene in the middle of the night where Marcia's son gets up to go to the bathroom. Brings Greg's son with him and they don't know where the bathroom is. And it's like, “You've been in this house how have you not peed yet? You got off the plane maybe you peed in the airport and then you came back. You're drinking all this eggnog. You're probably drinking other things. It's the middle of the night why do you not know where the bathroom is? What kind of hosts are Mike and Carol that they don't say, 'And this is where the bathroom is"?

Drew:  I think in the Brady universe people just don't go to the bathroom very often, but I think the fact that the kids are unclear where to pee in the middle of the night might be a reference to the fact that on the original show there's no toilet. You never saw a toilet, and we never hear that Mike and Carol put in another bathroom, so I guess all those people are using one disgusting bathroom this entire holiday.

Glen:  They use the downstairs bathroom in the middle of the night. They don't go upstairs. I'm guessing there's a guest bathroom.

Drew:  Mike and Carol have their own bathroom.

Glen:  Well, do they sleep on the first floor? No. Do they?

Drew:  I don't know. 

Glen:  Anyway.

Drew:  I don't think so. They do solve everyone's problems including doing absolutely nothing. Jan and—

Glen:  Philip.

Drew:  Philip. They decide, “Well, okay. I guess I don't hate you. Let's adopt a child.” And then—

Glen:  Well, the adopting of a child doesn't happen in this.

Drew:  It happened shortly after. There's no hint of Marcia's alcoholism in this episode.

Glen:  No.

Drew:  That's at least nice.

Glen:  Oh yeah the scene where in the middle of the night where all the kids and their spouses and significant others gather around the kitchen table to eat Alice's pies that's a very sweet moment.

Drew:  Yeah and even though it's very stagy and unrealistic there's something about them all just sitting quietly thinking about their troubles.

Glen:  Well, I just think that as we're all now adults there is still a divide between parent and child. The children will still have their own sort of interaction with each other that is separate from a parent whether because you're trying to keep problems from parents or trying to solve a parent's problems without their interaction and so that seems a nice, realistic depiction of family life during the holidays. You find whatever moments of peace you can get.

Drew:  And then everyone has their big moment at the Christmas dinner table except for Jan who doesn't get anything to do because Carol solved their problems earlier that day and presumably they had sex in the guest bedroom, which is weird. 

Glen:  I liked that it was sort of structured around Mike's clichéd speeches. He always gives a big speech and so he starts his big speech and then all the kids sort of fill in because they think that he is specifically talking about them [missing scene?? 01:17:27], and then it just sort of snowballs and everyone's like, "Here's what my storyline coming into this episode was." 

Drew:  In The Bradys, Bobby continues being a—

Glen:  Gay.

Drew:  —race car driver, but he crashes his car in the first episode and becomes a paraplegic and his college girlfriend comes to help him rehabilitate himself—played by MTV, original MTV VJ Martha Quinn, but that is the end of his race car storyline where it's like, “Oh, you can't be a race car driver anymore. Here's a heterosexual coupling for you.” So not driving a race car makes him straight again. So it kind of actually works in a very odd way.

Glen:  So yeah that's my reach around for this. Race car driving is gay. 

Drew:  What do we make of the grand finale which is the plot that we haven't spent much time on because the movie itself spends very little time on which is the building that Mike is designing—

Glen:  Formerly designing—he quit.

Drew:  Right. Because—

Glen:  Because the builder would not live up to Mike's expectations for structural integrity.

Drew:  The building collapses before they can eat dinner and there are two security guards trapped inside.

Glen:  Why?

Drew:  Someone has to guard a building on Christmas. I don't know. Mike goes to rescue them which does not make sense because great though he might look he's not a young man and don't send the elderly architect to pull out the people trapped in the building, but he does and then everyone else shows up and then there's a ton of people there. 

Glen:  Yeah. I don't know where or why all those people don't have families.

Drew:  Including the news caster.

Glen:  Who, because it's so strange—so—I don't want to say low energy, but—

Drew:  Low energy but also intrusive at the same time. When Mike gets there he's clearly important leave him alone.

Man:  Move back please. Move back.

TV Announcer:  From what we understand there are two men trapped in the cave in and as long as the supports hold they'll be safe. Now we've been told that someone is on his way with a plan to rescue them. In fact someone's coming this way. Perhaps that's the man they've been waiting for. Excuse me sir, are you the architect or the engineer?

Mike:  Uh, no I. 

TV Announcer:  What have they told you so far? Can you give us a statement sir? Okay. Well, apparently there's no time for an interview but as soon as we get it we'll pass it on to you.

Drew:  And then—

Glen:  I guess I will get my interview with him after. 

Drew:  It's very strange. Actress's name is Ines Pedroza. If you look at her filmography from 1970 on all she played was TV news reporters.

Glen:  She should be better at it.

Drew:  Right. Usually when you see someone that plays a lot of reporters you'd be like, “Oh, that person actually is a Los Angeles area reporter. That's why they were given that job.” She clearly is not a real reporter, but she plays a reporter on Dynasty, A-Team, Trapper John, Matlock, nine episodes of Hunter. She was like part of the Hunter universe and her delivery is so very strange—I don't know why—and the shitty part of all is that when Mike finally does emerge and it's a happy ending she's the one that points out that the accident happened on 34th Street and it's the miracle on 34th Street and you're just like, “Uck.”

Inexplicable TV Reporter:  Folks this is a Christmas story with a really happy ending, and I just noticed the street sign on the corner. It looks like another miracle on 34th Street. 

Drew:  That is very strange. We don't need another character at this point, but we are introduced to Inexplicable TV Reporter and she is there for all the drama including Mike being trapped in the building even after the security guards emerge, not really explain why that happened and then Carol—Christmas Carol solves it by singing Oh, Come All Ye Faithful after Cindy points out, “Do you remember when I was a little girl and I wished you would get your voice back and you did and you sang Oh, Come All Ye Faithful.”

Glen:  She wished—she asked Santa. 

Drew:  She asked Santa. Also it's really weird to have this girl being like, “I remember when this happened,” but then it flashes back to the real Cindy.

Glen:  It's not her.

Drew:  It's like, “You don't remember shit.”

Glen:  No I actually had Oh—I went into—in my head I went into an extended story about a replacement child who something has-- is injected with the memories of the family just so she can play this child better. Oh, it was horrifying in my head. We've not talked about the hot mustache man in the background of the singing of the carol. 

Drew:  The news reporter's also singing with them which I think was inappropriate.

Glen:  But yeah, the mustache man actually continues singing after everyone else has stopped singing. 

Drew:  What is he singing?

Glen:  His mouth is just still moving.

Drew:  He might not have been a professional actor he might have been—

Glen:  I'll post a screen capture of him on Twitter when this episode comes out. Well, no—I'll be gone. I'll send it to you. You can do it.

Drew:  You can still post it on Twitter from Florida.

Glen:  But this—the picture's on my computer—my desktop. 

Drew:  You IM'd it to me so it will be in your text messages.

Glen:  Oh, goddammit. 

Drew:  Yep. Mike emerges. It's not really much of a miracle really.

Glen:  Yep. Mike comes out of the crumbling building of his heterosexuality. 

Drew:  [laughs] I mean, that is the better metaphor, but yeah he apparently wasn't that far from the entrance when he just stopped trying and then he was like, “Oh right, I have a family. Oh, they're singing I better go out and—”

Glen:  Yeah. I don't know how the singing got him out. Maybe if it was dark in there and he couldn't find his way and the singing guided him, but I also don't know why he ran in the building after telling the builder dig a trench to relieve stress. It's like, “Wait until your plan is done to go in there. Obviously things are going to shift around if you're digging a trench in the back of the building. Wait and see how that works out, Mike.”

Drew:  Yeah. They don't really act very logically. It's true. And then it ends—

Glen:  Oh, with Sam showing up as Santa Claus.

Drew:  So, weirdly, the actor who played Sam was still alive that is not that actor. The actor who plays Sam dressed as Santa Claus you can't even see his face which I guess is because it wasn't Sam, but the person they got is Lewis Arquette father of Patricia, Rosanna, David, and Alexis. Who was also on The Waltons and is an actor that people would recognize, but—so they had to pay him to come in and play a role where he's not really recognizable. He's also in Scream 2. 

Glen:  Oh.

Drew:  He plays the campus sheriff in Scream 2. 

Glen:  Also baffling that Santa—if a man dressed as Santa shows up at your door unexpectedly at Christmas, because Mike and Carol don't seem to be in on the joke that it's Sam.

Drew:  No. No one does.

Glen:  No one does. Do not—if a man—if this year or any time a man shows up on your doorstep dressed as Santa do not invite him in without knowing who this man is, because he could probably be there to murder your whole family. 

Drew:  There's that whole Tales of the Darkside.

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  Tales from the Crypt?

Drew:  Tales from the Crypt. 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  Not the movie, but the weird British version.

Glen:  Movie? What? Tales from—this is an episode—what I'm thinking of.

Drew:  There was a British Hammer horror thing called Tales from the Crypt and she plays the woman who—is—murders her husband and then Santa Claus comes in and it's—yeah anyway.

Alice:  Coming, coming, coming, coming. Santa? 

Sam:  Ho. Ho. Ho. Merry Christmas. Ho. Ho. Ho. 

Kevin:  It's Santa Claus. 

Jessica:  Oh, Santa.

Kevin:  Merry Christmas, Santa.

Mickey:  If you're really Santa Claus where's your bag of presents? 

Sam:  Sorry kids, I just have one present for Alice. Oh, I didn't mean to break up your Christmas dinner. I'm sorry folks.

Carol:  Well, that's alright Santa, whoever you are. 

Alice:  Did you say you had a present for me?

Sam:  Yeah. I brought you me.

Alice:  Sam? 

All:  It's Sam. 

Sam:  I've been a fool Alice. It's Christmas. Please have the spirit. Do you have it in your heart to take me back? 

Alice:  Sam don't you ever do anything like that again. 

Sam:  Oh, I won't. I promise. You're top sirloin. Next to you everybody else is just chopped liver. 

Carol:  [laughs]

Kids:  Chopped liver.

Carol:  Looks like we all got our Christmas wishes.

Mike:  We wish you a Merry Christmas. 

[cast sings "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"]

Drew:  And the present is, “I'm sorry for leaving you. Take me back,” and everyone's like, “Oh, Sam.” I was like, “No!” Maybe Alice will take him back, but you do not have to forgive him right now. He did a terrible thing and then he didn't. That's not how you apologize. 

Glen:  The Bradys don't get a say in it. I'm sorry. She may be treated like family, but no.

Drew:  Yeah. And then it ends.

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  And you're like, “Okay. That's it.” Still enjoyable to watch, still just a very odd piece of pop culture trivia that turned—they decided to turn into Thirty Something—Brady Something. Yeah.

Glen:  Yeah. Forgetting all the stuff that surrounds it—the failed series, whatever. Just revisiting that family both in 1988 when I first watched it and now it's just nice. There are nice moments. It's not great TV. It's pleasant. 

Drew:  It's very pleasant TV. If you feel like you need some of this in your life it's on Hulu in its entirety. I was very happy that it was easy to watch so if you have never seen A Very Brady Christmas there's worse ways you can spend ninety minutes. Yeah. I don't want to compare this to prestige television like the new Watchman series or Twin Peaks: The Return. I would say both of those things are good examples of taking material that people knew very, very well that had a very specific place in American culture and updating it and changing it just enough without ruining it and this is like a 1988 version of that where it's like, “Yep. That's about how you did it.” I can't suggest ways except for some of the plot inconsistencies that we pointed out that was a tough thing to do when they pulled it off and that's why this is something that got rerun for years after The Bradys was canceled people just liked that it existed.

Glen:  Yeah. I mean, aside from the whole thirty minutes of talking about whether they're going to go to—quote/unquote—the Orient or Greece.

Drew:  Yeah. We don't do that anymore. 

Glen:  No we don't. Yeah. I think—I think if you look at something like Christmas Vacation that is a better example of how you do lots of family members coming home for Christmas, and dealing with Christmas is the bulk of the plot line. This really was more about showing the lives of the Bradys updated and not really    too much about Christmas other than they're coming home for Christmas. 

Drew:  Weirdly it was not envisioned as being a set up for a new revival TV series. It was just supposed to be its own stand-alone thing where you're right they don't actually spend that much time on Christmas. Christmas is not the tenth member of the Brady family in this show, even though there's way more than ten at this point.

Glen:  But the TV reporter is—you could say the tenth member of the Brady clan.

Drew:  Ines. Ines. I love Ines and it's for disco. All of The Bradys—I think all seven episodes of it is on YouTube if you want to watch it. Just skip around. Pick a scene and just be like, “This was something that was on TV. Huh.” No, it's nine episodes because there are nine episodes through which they go through three different renditions of the theme song. The final one is sung by Florence Henderson which is about I think how it should be.

Glen:  Oh yes. 

Drew:  I'm going to find the gayest, campiest, most disco-tastic version of a song that Florence ever sang, and I think it's going to be our outro track for this and how we're going to say goodbye to 2019, and how I'm going to say goodbye to Glen who's leaving me in Los Angeles all on my own with Thurman. 

Glen:  Bye. 

Drew:  You're coming back right? 

Glen:  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah. 

Drew:  We're going to do—we ended up getting nine episodes of this third season of the show out before the end of the year. I'm happy with that. We'll probably get another nine episodes after we get back.

Glen:  That makes eighteen. 

Drew:  That makes eighteen. That's a good, solid number. Glen, what's a good TV show you're looking forward to talking about in 2020?

Glen:  Uh. We're going to do The Nanny, right?

Drew:  We are going to do The Nanny. We have to pick which episode we're going to do. 

Glen:  I'm excited to talk about The Nanny. 

Drew:  That's going to be research that we're going to do—that I'm going to do when I'm here all on my own. Maybe I'll do that on Christmas when it's just me and Thurman and I don't have anyone.

Glen:  That sounds lovely.

Drew:  To sing carols with. Yeah. If you want to tweet holiday tidings to Glen you can do that @iwritewrongs. That's write with a -w- and wrongs with a -w- because that's how you spell wrongs.

Glen:  Is spelling it for me my Christmas present?

Drew:  Yes, but also I sent away for a Christmas present that's not here yet, so it was—

Glen:  Like, mail order? You clipped something out of the back of a comic book? 

Drew:  Sort of. I think you'll like it. It will be here when you get back—should you choose to come back.

Glen:  Okay.

Drew:  Follow me on Twitter @DrewGMackie. Follow this podcast on Twitter @GayestEpisode. Go to gayestepisode.com—no. It's actually GayestEpisodeEver.com. I forgot what our website was. Give us a rate and review. That's the present you should give us. Take five seconds. Do it while—do it now.

Glen:  I'll also take LEGO if you want to send me LEGO. 

Drew:  No. Do the rate and review. Screw your LEGO. That's it we don't need to talk about the rest of the stuff, people have already heard it. If they've lasted this long they've probably heard us say all that information many, many times. Let's just say podcast over. 

Glen:  Happy holidays forever.

Drew:  Goodbye forever. 

[“Beautiful Noise” performed by Florence Henderson plays]

Katherine:  A TableCakes production.