There’s no good reason to like A Very Brady Christmas.
But when you watch it, you will be confused by how much you do like it.
Let me explain what’s going to happen to you...
You will imagine your family can be better than they are. The Brady Bunch has always been about a kind of optimism that only exists in sacred corners of pop culture.
All those people. One bathroom. Tell me that’s not optimism.
Still, in their Christmas movie, each of these gosh darn Bradys is a damn wreck because they refuse to speak to each other. You know. Normal family stuff.
They aren’t communicating. The whole movie only takes place because Carol and Mike both decide to plan surprise holiday getaways for each other. When they can’t decide where to go, they settle on forcing their children to come home for the holidays.
Greg and his wife are bickering over whose family to spend the holidays with. Marcia and her husband are keeping his new unemployment underwraps. Jan and her husband are on the verge of divorce. Peter won’t propose to his girlfriend because he’s upset she earns more money than he does. Bobby quit school to be a racecar driver, and Mike just demanded Cindy come home without even performatively inviting her. Alice is separated from Sam and has decided returning to her role as the Bradys’ housekeeper is her best option.
There is not a happy lady in the bunch, and all these men are just the slightest nudge from being all on their own.
But you know it will be ok.
You don’t know what that feels like in real life, but it feels good in this movie.
This chaotic reliability of the Bradys will comfort you. It will make them relatable to you. It will chip away at the corny nostalgia. This is where your skepticism will start to break down, no match for the aweshuckness and downright jealousy you have for this fake sitcom family from before you were born.
Jan and her husband rekindle their marriage with some banter about the greylag goose and permission from Carol to be late to breakfast. It is cringy and overly simple. It is also all the non-judgemental advice you could ever want from your mom mixed with all the grace and forgiveness you could want from your partner when you remember loving them but can’t find your way back to it.
And when Mike is about to be crushed to death in a building collapse, everyone flashes back to an original episode--featuring the original Cindy-- and remembers the Christmas miracle that gave Carol her voice back, so she could since “O Come All Ye Faithful.” She sings it again, and that Brady optimism shines through. Mike gets free. You’re crying.
You’re crying because this is a family you know. And even though you know them, this is a family that will walk away from each other at the end of Christmas dinner still liking each other. Weird.
There’s no good reason to like A Very Brady Christmas, and there is also no way around it. It’s what the holidays are so often promised to be and so rarely are. It is an optimism that seems so out of reach most days that you almost forget it even exists.
Megan Cannella (she/they) is a Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. Her debut chapbook, Confrontational Crotch and Other Real Housewives Musings, is out now and available at https://linktr.ee/mcannella. You can find Megan on Twitter at @megancannella.