Hi Guys,

IMO the best Brady Bunch episodes were season 2-4. This was at a time when Robert Reed got really picky about realism in the show and insisted that he have influence over scripts and story lines. The studio brought in a friend of Reed's, script editor Tam Spiva (a man) In fact, any episode that you see with Tam Spiva as a script editor. (I believe he also wrote the scripts for the Grand Canyon/Hawaii episodes) is a great episode!

(Can someone post a list of all of the Tam Spiva, script editor episodes?) I would just like to see the titles of each one and assess the board's comments because those are among the best of the series!

In fact, two Tam Spiva script editor stand out all-time classic episodes of The Brady Bunch are "Her Sister's Shadow" and "Bobby's Hero" (The best of the series for quality writing and content)

Thank you Robert Reed and Tam Spiva for bringing your realism to this classic show!!! (It sparred us from more of the Tiger/Fluffy chases from "The Honeymoon" pilot and that God-Aweful Skip Farnum!!!!!!! in "Now a Word From Our Sponsor!" I am totally with Robert Reed on this!

As a sidenote, do you guys think that "The Hair-Brained Scheme" is as bad as Robert Reed made it out to be? It's not good, but IMO it doesn't suck either.

Nothing wrong about "Impractical Joker" either. According to Growing up Brady, Reed especially hated the tag sequence. (But there are many screw ups in Growing up Brady with regard to factual errors and dialogue, not to mention episode guide errors "Impractical Joker's" written tag in GUB, is inconsistent with the actual spoken dialoge) I do however think that the tag did follow the premise of the story line.

I agree with Robert Reed's approach to keeping realism in the show more often than not. He did a great job!

Jack

Robert Reed was good at keeping the show real to an extent, but he botched it, as well as everyone else, by letting Mike's middle name become Thomas in The Bradys, when it had been Paul when he married Carol. Sherwood was quoted in one of the Brady books that he got dozens of letters about that mistake. At least they made a joke of it later in the Fox tv-movie about Mike becoming President by swearing him in as Michael Paul Thomas Brady. BTW, Paul is also Mike Lookinland's middle name, and his dad's name, so I thought maybe making Mike Brady's middle name Paul was a sort of inside nod to the fact that Bob Reed and Mike Lookinland were the two people in the cast who had each other's character names for their real names. I wonder if they ever got any bloopers on the show by responding to the wrong name at times.