Well here’s something you probably thought you’d never read on my blog — a post about the Brady Bunch. What I can say — its time has come.
I was scanning around the dial on Sunday morning when I came across an obscure cable station running The Brady Bunch. There was nothing else on so I ended up watching most of the show.
In the episode, Marcia, who at that time would have been 15 or 16 years old, has a crush on her dentist, an attractive middle-aged guy who sports a vintage 70s perm.
The dentist asked Marcia if she would like to go to the ballet with him and she accepts, in the process breaking off a date with a friend of her brother’s.
Hilarity ensues as Marcia fantasizes about becoming Mrs Dentist, but she ends up breaking off the date when she learns that he is already married.
As I watched the show I began to have this strange, nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The episode had all of the normal sitcom trappings — the bad jokes, the double entendres, and the pat ending, but something about the plot seemed a little off to me.
All of a sudden it hit me. The moral dilemma was not presented as a middle-aged, married dentist asking a high school student on a date, but rather that Marcia had to break off an already existing date.
Continuing to extrapolate, I have come to the conclusion that in the Brady-universe it would have been OK for Marcia to date a man twenty years or more her senior, providing he was single. Heck, she could date Sam the Butcher, should be ever decide to break it off with Alice.