EPISODE 3b: FLUFFY’S FAREWELL
Audiences learn what really happened to the Brady girls’ marmalade cat when a Buick Skylark flattens the hapless feline during the Bradys’ honeymoon. Everyone learns a valuable lesson about not getting too attached to pets.

EPISODE 18b: MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPER
Now that the Bradys have pretty much gotten over the “blended family” hump, Carol no longer feels challenged by her role as a homemaker. Alice takes care of most of the household chores, and with six goody-two-shoes kids in the family, Carol doesn’t have much to do. She tries to share her feelings with Mike, but he dismisses her restlessness as “Women’s Lib nonsense.” Anxious and on edge, she visits her doctor and gets a prescription for Valium, and it helps — at first. But in a short time, Carol finds herself increasing the dosage, and washing it down with Cutty Sark. She begins slurring her speech; she wears the same pantsuit three or four days in a row. When her needlepoint begins to suffer, the family stages an intervention, Mike lets Carol join a consciousness-raising group, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about mixing alcohol and prescription drugs.

EPISODE 49b: THE GRASS IS NEVER GREENER
One afternoon in the back yard, Peter goes long for a pass from Greg and falls down, scraping his knee. Peter becomes feverish and nauseated over the next twenty-four hours, but Mike and Carol don’t associate his flu-like symptoms with the fall he suffered and confine him to bed. Soon, his fever rages out of control, and his hallucinations of “pork chops and applesauce . . . PORK CHOPS AND APPLESAUCE”
send a terrified Bobby and Greg from a sound sleep into a waking nightmare as their brother shrieks and flails about in the top bunk. Mike and Carol restrain Peter with Alice’s extra aprons and bundle him into the station wagon as he continues to rant and rave. At the hospital, doctors can’t agree on a preliminary diagnosis and resort to firing a tranquilizer dart into Peter’s left buttock, but as nurses cut off his clothing, they discover a green gash on his leg. “Astroturf poisoning!” they exclaim. After extensive skin grafts and a bedside visit from O.J. Simpson, Peter feels just fine again, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about wearing long pants while horsing around on the artificial turf.

EPISODE 65b: IT’S ALL IN THE MIND
When a classmate gives a report on mental retardation in health class, Jan starts wondering about Cindy. She discusses her concerns with Marcia, and together they look at the evidence — the lisp; the constant stupid questions and goofy comments; the disastrous performance on the kiddie game show. Marcia thinks she remembers their late father dropping Cindy on her head a bunch of times. Still, they try to forget their suspicions — until a short bus arrives the next morning to take Cindy to school! Horrified, Marcia and Jan demand an explanation from Carol, who clears up the misunderstanding by telling them that the regular school bus broke down, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about the difference between “brain damaged” and “as dumb as a box of hammers.”

EPISODE 71b: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
The girls come home from school to find Carol offering coffee and oatmeal cookies to a pair of very handsome FBI agents. While Marcia and Jan moon over Agents Robertson and McGill, Cindy wants to know if they have ever killed anyone. Carol shoos them out of the kitchen, but they linger in the living room to eavesdrop, thus finding out the hard way that the agents have come to discuss their father, who — to their surprise — died in a gangland shoot-out. After the Feds leave, the girls ask Carol for the truth, and their mother admits that she hid the real circumstances of her first husband’s death from them: “I told you that auto-erotic asphyxiation story to spare your feelings.” The girls try to understand and forgive, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about the responsibilities of membership in Cosa Nostra.

EPISODE 80b: IN THE CLOSET
During a game of dress-up, Bobby and Cindy raid Mike’s closet and discover a pair of vinyl pants with the butt cut out. When they confront Carol with their discovery, she claims Mike bought them as “part of a cowboy costume,” but the look on her face tells a different story. Bobby and Cindy, suspecting that their father leads a double life, tell their brothers and sisters about the mysterious pants, and the kids decide to get to the bottom of the story. That night at dinner, Peter asks Mike leading questions about Judy Garland while Marcia and Jan pointedly discuss cute boys at school, hoping to elicit a reaction from Mike. Carol tries to change the subject, only to have an angry and betrayed Greg call her a fag hag and storm away from the table. Mike can no longer hide the truth and comes out to the kids, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about tolerance as the whole family — even Greg — tells Mike they love him no matter what.

EPISODE 88b: SAINT ALICE
After four years of a chaste relationship with Sam, Alice sublimates her desire for tube steak by attending tent revivals. In just a few short weeks, her newfound fundamentalist beliefs have turned the Brady house topsy-turvy, as she leads the family in half-hour blessings at dinnertime and starts hemming Marcia’s and Jan’s miniskirts to a more modest length. The kids pass the hat for a deprogramming session with Mackenzie Phillips, and Alice returns to her old wise- cracking, trampoline-jumping, unappreciated self, but not before everyone learns a valuable lesson about the dangers of religious extremism.

EPISODE 94b: THIN IS IN
Determined to get attention no matter what the cost, Jan embarks on a diet, forgoing her usual after-school root beer float. But when she doesn’t see any results, she takes more drastic measures, passing up the school lunch and excusing herself early from the dinner table. The diet pills she downs by the handful make her irritable, and she snarls at Greg that his Johnny Bravo trip really bums her out, but as usual, Greg doesn’t give much credence to Jan’s opinion. Jan gets thinner and thinner, eating only the occasional leaf of iceberg lettuce, but of course, nobody notices. Only when she collapses during Greg’s home-movie re-enactment of the Pilgrim voyage does the family realize that she weighs less than seventy pounds, but after a few weeks on an IV and intensive counseling, Jan returns home to the indifferent bosom of her family. Marcia begins dating a handsome medical student, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about accepting one’s non-Marcia status in life.

EPISODE 102b: TO BE A MAN
Bobby awakens one night to find his sheets damp. Fearing that he has begun wetting the bed again a mere six months after swearing off the pull-ups, he launders the sheets himself, vowing to tell nobody. But Greg hears Bobby muttering the words “Suzie Chapstick” in his sleep and deduces that Bobby has had his first nocturnal emission. The brothers have a heart-to-heart talk about adolescent sexuality, and Bobby garners himself unexpected popularity at school by repeating the entire discussion on the playground. Everyone learns a valuable lesson about not giggling when saying the word “penis.”

EPISODE 104b: HAIR TODAY . . .
Greg and Peter, dissatisfied with the length of time that puberty has taken to turn their hair coarse and curly, head to Carol’s beauty parlor of choice to get themselves a couple of root perms. Wacky hijinks ensue as they hide from the prying eyes of their classmates behind the latest issue of Redbook, laugh at the sight of each other in curlers, and shout over the din of the dryers. But when the last of the setting lotion disappears down the drain, the boys have a whole new far-out look. Mike takes a page from their book a few episodes later and gets a spiral perm of his own, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about replicating the texture of pubic hair.

EPISODE 120b: KISSING OFF COUSINS
When Mike and Carol go out of town for the weekend, the Brady kids turn their pent-up aggression loose on Cousin Oliver, locking him in the basement, making him drink out of the toilet, and refusing to let him sing on their latest hit single. When Bobby challenges Cousin Oliver to a game of pogo-stick chicken, little Ollie whacks his head on the driveway, suffers a cerebral blood clot, and dies — and the kids have to dispose of the body before their parents return! You’ll have to tune in to see what happens next, but let’s just say that Sam’s meat locker makes a return appearance, and that everyone learns a valuable lesson about trying to save a sitcom in decline by introducing an unappealing tertiary character that looks like John Denver’s love child.

Share!