The Good

The Bad

I have been a fan of The Brady Bunch forever. I don’t even remember when I started watching the show, it just always seems like I have. I don’t love it because I find it ironic. I don’t watch it just so I can look back and laugh at the outfits from the 1970s (although why those fashions were so big is beyond me). I watch it because it is genuinely good TV. There was a lot happening on the show even though a lot of people don’t see it that way. I am not saying that I always watch this show with this serious of an attitude, I mean after all this show is supposed to be fun, right? I just wanted to make it clear, right off the bat, that my feelings about this show come from a very strong feeling about it being something important in my life

The Brady Bunch - The Complete Second Season picks up where season one left off. We have Greg wanting his own room, Marcia becoming more of an independent woman, Peter getting into the only kind of trouble he can, Jan suffering from the “middle-child” syndrome, Bobby being his precocious self and Cindy trying not tattle (among other things). As usual, Mr. and Mrs. Brady have all the right answers and Alice is always there to sort of help everything along. While people might scoff at this representation of the American Family, I will say that things are never as they seem. In trying to help their children grow, Mr. and Mrs. Brady make their fair share of mistakes. The problems that the kids find themselves in are very real and as a result, I think, have helped a whole generation of children like myself grow up.

Lofty praise? Yes. Warranted praise? Completely.

Features

No extras came with this DVD box set. I could cry and bemoan this fact but at the end of the day I am so happy to have Season 1 and Season 2 on DVD, that I am willing to overlook a few things. Also, let us not forget that we still have seasons 3-5 to get through. Also, I just found out another patch of good news...

The Third Season of The Brady Bunch tures>

Video

Full Screen Format. I honestly would have been livid if these shows would have been letterboxed. To do something like that to this show, to artificially add something as intrusive as that, to try and make it look a lot better then it already does, would be an enormous detriment to it. Not that I think these episodes look bad, but they do have a look. They are very much a product of their times. I have always thought that The Brady Bunch was very much one of those shows that looked like those “Precaution Films” I used to see when I was in elementary school. Yet, I felt that The Brady Bunch, while it may have looked like one of those movies (and it was a movie because my teachers showed them to me on a projector not a VCR), certainly had a lot of more “heart” then those films. I think fans are going to welcome these DVDs with open arms. They may be light in the extras department but there are so many episodes that I think that more then makes up for it.

Audio

Dolby Digital - English - Mono. Nobody has ever really talked about the music for these shows. While I am sure that some consider them sappy, nostalgic and just plain bad, I have always loved the music that underscores the themes of these particular episodes. For example, when Mr. and Mrs. Brady have to reprimand a child, the music that plays really underscores the sadness of the situation. Or when Mr. and Mrs. Brady have to help their children, and they say something that makes their problems easy to solve, the music feels just right. Sure, things get a bit cheesy but what made this show work was the way the actors and actresses played their parts. They never winked at the camera, they never seemed above the material (even though I hear that in real life Mr. Brady felt that he was), and they never played down any of the themes and ideas that this show was trying to put across. At the end of the day, The Brady Bunch may not be perfect, but it’s good enough to be canonized on DVD and it’s something that I hope other people will share with their children.

Package

Purple is the order of the day here. With a motif that looks like the opening of the show, all the characters magically looking at each other within their little boxes, this set very much keeps in the same spirit as the first one. The back features a description of what’s on these DVDs, some pictures from the various episodes, an episode listing and some technical specs. Two DVDs makes up this set with the 24 episodes spaced throughout them on these doublesided disks. They are each housed in their own plastic case. How in the world they have been able to put 10 hours on both these disks is beyond me, but Paramount has done a splendid job of keeping this box set very economical while not sacrificing any of the shows quality. Great work!

Final Word

What can I say? I loved The Brady Bunch - The Complete Second Season. This show is so well done, so well written and so true to many of my experiences growing up, that it saddens me somewhat that people don’t take this show as seriously as they should. I just wish that people had more reverence for show, but I am starting to think that maybe what I think is people putting the show down, is really their way of showing their affection for it. Maybe, like me, this show touches something deep inside of them, and as a result the best way they can deal with these feelings is to sort of distance themselves from it? Who knows, maybe I am taking this show too seriously?

Whatever the case may be, I knew going into this review that I was going to love this DVD box set. I knew that I would probably have nothing bad to say about it. Short of these DVDs not playing, I don’t think there are many ways that I could “down” this second season collection. So I apologize right now if it seems like this review was padded a bit. I just happen to think that The Brady Bunch is one of the best television shows ever created, and I look forward to owning all 5 sets on DVD!

Sherwood Schwartz is a genius.