A Very Special Episode - The Brady Bunch, "Dough Re Mi"

[Ubiquitous]

by Noel Murray

Sometimes a single TV episode can exemplify the spirit of its time and
the properties that make television a unique medium. A Very Special
Episode presents The A.V. Club’s survey of TV at its most distinctive.

You’ve seen it, this moment, probably more times than you can remember.
A television character pulls out a guitar and starts to sing a heartfelt
song about peace and love. The camera moves from his hands, plucking
away, to his face, with the eyes closed and chin raised. Then there’s a
cut to the other people in the room, all beaming with pride and exuding
Inner Light, while occasionally turning and looking appreciatively at
each other. Giving the nod. The Brady Nod.

The clip below is from the third-season Brady Bunch episode “Dough Re
Mi,” or what most people of my generation call “the one where Peter’s
voice changes and Greg writes a song about it.” I’ve told at least four
friends over the past month that I was about to cover this particular
episode, and in every single case, they immediately launched into a
credible rendition of the episode’s climactic song, “Time To Change,”
complete with an impression of Peter’s cracking croon. But not one of
them remembered much about the first song, “We Can Make The World A
Whole Lot Brighter.” That’s the one that Greg claims is “a sure-fire hit
song… a gold record.” That’s the one with the heavy message that we all
need to hear, man.



In fact, “Dough Re Mi” opens with Greg locking himself into his bedroom
for hours with his guitar and a notebook, so he can hone that gem. When
he emerges, he tells his younger brothers Peter and Bobby and his
stepsisters Marcia, Jan, and Cindy that he’s written this super song,
but that he doesn’t have the money to record it properly, at the best
studio in town. Even though Peter is friends with the son of the
producer who runs the studio, he can’t get Greg a rate any lower than
$150 for a session. But Peter does get a bright idea for how to raise
the money and increase Greg’s chances of scoring a hit. He suggests that
every Brady sibling pitch in some money, and that they form a family
group called The Brady Six, since family groups are all the rage. And so
we get the spectacle of the Brady kids singing together as one, while
their parents and their maid Alice nod away at Greg’s sweet, significant
song.

Writer Harlan Ellison had a classification for songs like “We Can Make
The World A Whole Lot Brighter.” He called it “defanged dissent.”
Ellison coined the term in a column he wrote for The Los Angeles Free
Press in July 1970—one of a three-year run of columns about television
and revolutionary culture that he later collected in two volumes as The
Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. The two books are out of print, but
reasonably easy to find, and I’d call them essential reading for anyone
interested in television, criticism, Ellison, or the way changing values
among the youth of the late ’60s and early ’70s shook up Hollywood—which
then, as now, relied on interested young eyeballs to persuade their
advertisers to spend.



In his column, Ellison wrote from the perspective of an insider—an
award-winning TV writer with lots of friends and acquaintances in the
business—and he wrote as someone sympathetic to “the movement,” and thus
repulsed by the way his colleagues tried to pander to youth with
faux-hip lingo and characters, or the way they went the opposite
direction and trashed the rising generation in order to feed the
reactionaries. According to Ellison:

Had they the slightest, smallest vestige of control over
the material they contribute to television, the members of
the WGA could conceivably arrest the trends in this land
toward repression, violence, mass ignorance, and the death
slide down the trough to ecological and sociological ruin.
But writers in this industry have allowed themselves to be
brainwashed into believing they are no better than bricklayers,
crop-dusters, sewer maintenance men. They are creative typists.

When The Brady Bunch debuted in 1969, the show’s cast looked strikingly
pre-Kennedy, but when “Dough Re Mi” aired on January 14, 1972—just a
couple of months before Ellison stopped writing his column—the kids had
gone shaggier, in keeping with the times. You can see the transition
just beginning in the opening credits of The Brady Bunch’s third season,
where everyone looks stuck halfway between clean-cut and counterculture:


The Brady Bunch was created by Sherwood Schwartz, who, like a number of
people in showbiz in the 1960s, was looking for a way to reflect the
increasingly fractured state of the American family. (See also: the
movies Yours, Mine And Ours and Divorce American Style, the TV series
The Courtship Of Eddie’s Father and Family Affair, and so many more.)
Ellison noted the phenomenon in his column:

The network mufti who bought all of this drivel, from The
Doris Day Show to Here’s Lucy, in their paralyzing fear of
portraying anything even remotely resembling the realities
of life in These United States, have opted for crippled
families of husbandless wives or wifeless husbands, all
playing Pygmalion to raise their kids with a vested interest
in “acceptable morality” and the beliefs of generations nudging
the grave.

That just about sums up the most persistent problem with The Brady
Bunch. Here was a show that was plugged into its times in so many ways,
given that it was about a blended family, living in au courant Los
Angeles, with six children of varying ages and dispositions. And yet the
show’s mandate was to keep it light and bright, while pushing
traditional values. On the rare occasion that The Brady Bunch addressed
issues of the day like racism or women’s rights, it did so with no
particular passion for the causes, any more than the writers really
cared about whether Cousin Oliver was a jinx, or whether Cindy’s Kitty
Karry-All doll was cursed. Really, the plot of any given Brady Bunch
barely mattered; people tuned in then and probably still tune in now
just to spend time in one family’s cool-looking house in a relatively
carefree southern-California suburb. The show is more an environment
than a piece of narrative art.

As such, verisimilitude was never a Brady Bunch priority. Even if we buy
that Greg’s drippy song—with lines like, “God made the land for each and
every man / So we must do all we can to save it”—is a guaranteed smash,
are we really supposed to believe that all he has to do to break into
the music business is to walk into a studio and start recording? Or that
Peter could interrupt someone else’s recording session, and the “best
producer in town” would drop what he’s doing to hear him out?




After Peter comes up with his Brady Six plan—arguing, “We could make
three times as much as The Carpenters!”—he and Greg persuade the other
siblings to kick in about half the money they need, and then they get
the rest from their father. But first, Dad protests, “Greg, I’m an
architect, I don’t want to branch out into the record-producing
business!” Greg brings their money to the big-shot producer—most of it
in pennies, as is the industry standard—and books their session. Then
they settle in to rehearse, and are starting to sound pretty smooth
before Peter begins croaking.


Of course, Peter’s changing voice shouldn’t really affect anything. His
brothers and sisters can easily record the song without him, and can
even still call themselves The Brady Six. This actually occurs to the
kids too, and they hold a vote about whether to kick Peter out of the
group—a vote which ends in a tie because Cindy votes both “yes” and
“no”—but then their mother intervenes and tells them that while it’s up
to them, she thinks some things are more important than money. And so
they’re all ready to pack it in, before Greg gets a bright idea.


I confess that I was a dedicated Brady Bunch-watcher when I was a boy. I
never saw the show in first-run as far as I can recall—I would’ve been
not quite 4 years old when the show went off the air in 1974—but as a
child of divorce and a latch-key kid, I was drawn to The Brady Bunch in
syndication, especially during those long Southern summers when there
wasn’t much to do but spend entire afternoons watching reruns of old TV
shows on the local UHF stations. Even now, The Brady Bunch generates
reliable pangs of nostalgia for me, whenever I see the family’s
hand-patted burgers cooking on a large outdoor grill…



…or their colorful, pattern-heavy fashions, or the kids’ rooms, which
are adorned with trippy posters and toys. That’s where I wanted to
escape when I was younger, and it’s hard even now to shake its appeal.



For the most part, though, I find The Brady Bunch tough to sit through
for an entire 22-minute episode. I’m talking Spanish Inquisition tough.
From Alice’s lame wisecracks to the contrived problem-plots, I wince at
The Brady Bunch now far more often than I groove to it. Re-watching
“Dough Re Mi,” I got goose pimples of horror at the goofy way the
episode resolves, with Greg writing “Time To Change” to take advantage
of Peter’s voice, and The Brady Six recording it in front of a studio
full of people, all giving The Brady Nod.


Again, because we’re in Bradyland, I won’t ask some of the key questions
I have about how “Dough Re Mi” ends. Like, how did they afford a band to
record a backing track? And given that the epilogue has Peter trying to
maintain his cracked voice, since that’s now the group’s “special
sound,” are we to assume that “Time To Change” did in fact become a hit?
If so, why isn’t the rest of the series all about the fame and fortune
of The Brady Six? These questions, nagging as they may be, are
ultimately irrelevant.

No, I’m more interested in the episode as an example of Ellison’s
defanged dissent. To some extent, “Dough Re Mi” represents the triumph
of the younger generation, if only because the clothes, the music, and
issues like ecology are presented here as normal, not radical. But at
the same time… this is 1972. Vietnam’s still raging, the generational
clash over drugs is intensifying, and during the run of The Brady Bunch,
its target audience would likely been at least tangentially aware of
Woodstock, Altamont, Kent State, and other major polarizing moments in
the culture. Also, All In The Family and M*A*S*H were both already hits
when “Dough Re Mi” aired, and edgy comedians like Richard Pryor, George
Carlin, and the members of The Committee had become frequent guest stars
on primetime variety shows. Yet The Brady Bunch couldn’t be bothered to
get the fundamental details of the music business right, let alone to
reflect what was going on in the real world.

It was undoubtedly a challenge for Hollywood back in the early ’70s to
reach an increasingly plugged-in younger audience without wading into
the kind of controversies that turned sponsors off. With The Brady
Bunch, Schwartz and company chose to follow the course that Dynamite
magazine and other kid-focused ’70s media later did, treating even the
most politically charged popular culture as completely divorced from its
intended meaning. (The first issue of Dynamite in 1974 featured M*A*S*H
on its cover, for example.) The Brady Bunch started out as a show for
the whole family, but by the time it was paired with The Partridge
Family as a timeslot partner in 1970, it had become more of a show for
pre-teens. Then it started aiming even younger. During the last two
years of its run, it spawned a Saturday-morning cartoon featuring an
animated version of the Brady kids…


…and three years after The Brady Bunch was cancelled, it came back as an
ill-fated, truly bizarre variety series, produced by kid-entertainment
impresarios Sid and Marty Krofft.


The variety show tanked, and the original run of The Brady Bunch wasn’t
that successful either, never finishing a season in the Top 25 of the
Nielsen ratings. “Time To Change” was released as an actual single, and
couldn’t crack Billboard’s Hot 100. All of this seems to bear out Harlan
Ellison’s faith in the savvy of the younger generation. In a Glass Teat
column from 1968, Ellison wrote:

It became obvious this last week, inundated as we were with
political ‘specials,’ that the days of the fraud in politics
are numbered. Or more correctly, the inept fraud. The baby
kissing, slogan mouthing hypocrite: the machine politician.
TV’s eye is much too merciless, and the generations raised on
TV are too wise to the fraudulent; they’ve seen too many
commercials to ever again be taken in by demagogues and
political used car salesman.

So why is it that nearly everyone I grew up with remembers “Dough Re
Mi,” while only a handful know anything about The Committee? Thank
syndication. The Brady Bunch played perfectly as a five-day-a-week
time-killer for kids just coming home from school—frequently to a
grownup-free house—in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And because the
show’s stories and dialogue weren’t its main selling points, the
generation that watched The Brady Bunch the second time around could see
the same episodes over and over without getting burned out. The mood
woven by the show was a lot like the Bradys’ lawn: plastic and
evergreen.

The need to take comfort from a largely passive medium was something
Ellison understood implicitly—not for nothing did his television
criticism compare TV sets to a mother’s breast, after all—and yet his
Glass Teat columns sometimes forgot this basic truth. Ellison railed
against the Mustache Petes of show business, sneering at the corniness
of Danny Thomas and Andy Griffith, while standing up for “where it’s at”
comedians like David Steinberg and his dopey variety show The Music
Scene. The two Glass Teat books are bracing to read, a lot like an
off-the-cuff weekly journal in which Ellison veered off-topic frequently
to vent his spleen at Spiro Agnew, Flip Wilson, and Standard Oil. But
Ellison was never a disciplined critic, and didn’t pretend to be. He
forgave a lot of mediocrity because it had the right message or because
it was written by friends, and he blasted a lot of entertainment and
entertainers that have outlasted the heat of that particular moment in
history.

Still, Ellison was on to something when he warned against the
commodification of youth, and when I watch “Dough Re Mi,” I can’t help
but think about something else he wrote:

Even the music can be corrupted. They can take even something
as pure as the sounds and turn them into shit for the
monkeymass. And if they can do that, how much easier it must
be to take political theory, revolutionary activity, dissent,
all of the paraphernalia of the barricades and corrupt them,
turn them against their own people, use them to keep us in line.

Meanwhile, Alice nods.

--
"If Barack Obama isn't careful, he will become the Jimmy Carter of the
21st century."

[kingsf...@yahoo.com]

Can you please post a picture of yourself. I'd like to see what a freak like you looks like. Thanks.