The Brady Bunch

The Brady Bunch was one of the last of the old-style fun-around-the-house situation comedies, full of well-scrubbed children, trivial adventures, and relentlessly middle-class parents. The premise here was a kind of conglomerate family, formed by a widow with three daughters who married a widower with three sons; a nutty housekeeper, Alice, thrown in to act as referee; plus, of course, the family cat and a shaggy dog, Tiger.

All of these smiling faces lived in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the Los Angeles suburbs, from which Dad pursued his nice, clean profession as a designer and architect. Typical stories revolved around the children going steady, family camping trips, competition for the family telephone (at one point Dad installed a pay phone), and of course war in the bathroom.