The Brady Bunch stars Barry Williams and Christopher Knight shared their opinion about their characters’ on-screen siblings.
Entertainment Weekly reported that Williams, who played the eldest Brady son, Greg, and Knight, who played Mike Brady’s (Robert Reed) middle child, Peter, ranked the storylines of the Brady Bunch characters on a recent episode of their podcast, The Real Brady Bros. Williams shared he believed Carol Brady’s (Florence Henderson) middle daughter, Jan Brady, played by Eve Plum, had the most interesting storylines and brought depth to the beloved sitcom.
“Jan had more depth, she was more troubled. She was a middle child in the classic kind of sense. You know, a little bit sisterly toward Cindy (Susan Olsen), but kind of competitive with Marcia (Maureen McCormick). She always seemed to have a lot of angst, which I think gave her some depth in the show,” said Williams on his podcast. “Marcia, she was, like, the ultimate California beach girl — cute and nice and popular. And Cindy, you know, kind of eavesdropping, tattletale, not very bright through most seasons — character-wise, not person. So Jan, I think, had interesting waters to navigate.”
Knight agreed with his castmate about Jan. He also said that he believed his character shared some similarities to Jan due to their roles as middle children.
“And using that same logic, Peter would have the same or a similar sort of breadth, if you will, and I think the reason for that is, it’s pretty easy to define what the youngest is supposed to be and write kind of cliché to that, the tattletale, and the oldest, the leaders. And in so far as both Marcia and Greg played that leader role, Bobby (Mike Lookinland) and Cindy were the young kids that were cute,” said Knight while speaking to Williams. “In the middle, there’s no definition. You can go any number of ways, so by there not being a cliché definition of what middle actually is — although I think they tried with the Jan character by throwing in all that angst about not knowing who she was, they also threw it to Peter. You know, not having a personality.”
Plum spoke about her time on The Brady Bunch, which aired for five seasons until 1974, during an October 2023 interview with Yahoo Entertainment. She said that the series was not “considered popular or interesting” when it was originally airing.
“It’s only after the fact that all of these themes and digging into it and figuring it out, all of that’s happened,” said the actress. “Before that it was just the TV show, and we did it. And it either made good ratings or it didn’t. It wasn’t consider relevant. It was consider saccharine.”
