I can’t believe I finally get to tell the world about this perfect episode of the forgotten show Day by Day.
From Family Ties to Different Strokes, 1980s sitcoms were full of yuppies and preppies. By the 1990s the trend had swung to the losers/slackers (The Simpsons, That 70s Show, etc). In between these was Day by Day, which ran from February 1988 to June 1989. If anyone remembers the show, it might be for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ as Eileen, who’s hilarious performance is one body-push away from her almost-namesake in Seinfeld.
Day by Day is a show about a recovering yuppie couple, Brian and Kate Harper (Douglas Sheehan and Linda Kelsey) who quit Wall Street to start a daycare. Eileen is their yuppie friend who doesn’t understand why they quit. Also of note, Courtney Thorne-Smith plays Kristin, their daycare employee who flashes the same charm she would carry all the way to Melrose Place.
If that were all, Day by Day would sit squarely in 80s yuppie-land and I’d be glad it is forgotten. Enter Christopher Daniel Barnes as teenage son, Ross Harper.
Ross is the only sitcom character I know defined by his love for wearing a robe. By my account, he is also the first TV slacker of the slacker-wave. The movie Slacker wouldn’t coin the term until 1990, but slackerism was in the air, both Bill & Ted and Wayne’s World debuted February 1989, midway through Day by Day’s run.
Day by Day episodes were mostly flawed affairs, Louis-Dreyfuss raised the comedy bar with every appearance, Thorne-Smith was always charming and funny, and Barnes consistently stole the show, but the writing was uneven, and the focus on the ex-yuppie parents often fell flat, so after 33 episodes the show was cancelled, but not before producing One Perfect Episode.
Episode 24, “A Very Brady Episode,” may also be one of the best sitcom episodes ever produced.
The episode revolves around Ross, who has failed a history paper because “channel 22 has been having a Brady Bunch marathon.” His parents take away his TV rights as punishment, but late at night he pulls out his handheld mini-TV, puts on the Brady Bunch and falls asleep watching the show.
In his dream, Ross appears at the top of the stairs in the original Brady house. He is now Chuck Brady. Mom Brady insists he needs to take off his robe. Underneath, he’s wearing full polyester and platform shoes. The jokes flow non-stop as we watch most of the original Brady Bunch cast (except Greg, Jan, and Cindy) have the most fun they’ve had since the Brady’s were cancelled in 1974. Without a fault they all reprise their roles with a permanent snicker, as they deliver lines like, “There’s nothing like that fourth cup of coffee in the morning” (Florence Henderson as Carol Brady), “All Brady men have perms” (Robert Reed as Mike Brady), “Don’t be a turnip-brain we never ride our bikes” (Christopher Knight as Peter) “We just fix them” (Mike Lookinland as Bobby with a pornstache). But the winning moment is when Maureen McCormick as Marcia walks in “I have some wonderful news!” she says as she stands there in her third trimester of pregnancy. “I’m running for president of student council,” she says.
The episode gets more surreal as Eileen (Louis-Dreyfuss) and Kristin (Thorne-Smith) show up in cheerleader outfits, giggling, speaking in unison, doing bad cheers and looking for Greg. “He’s out back fixing his bike,” says pregnant Marcia with a sneaky smile.
Throughout, Ross is the only one who can hear the background music swell every time the parents give banal advice to the kids. Then Mr and Mrs. Brady start repeating jokes, “This is a rerun, Chuck,” Mrs. Brady explains. The dream devolves into weirdness until Alice (Ann B Davis) punches Chuck with her new boxing gloves (“a gift from Sam the Butcher”) and wakes him up.
Throughout this sequence, we get to see practically every Brady Bunch trope poked fun at by the same actors who played them ad nauseum in the 70s, and you can tell they’ve been wanting to do that for a loooong time. Meanwhile, we’re with Ross, deftly playing straight-man as we watch our beloved Bradys run circles around themselves, at one point, literally. It’s the best kind of meta-sitcom and an episode that should be included with every Brady Bunch collection.
At the end, Ross wakes up back home but still in a dream that has become a horrifying nightmare. Eventually, he wakes up again and all is fine, of course, it’s a sitcom.
PS - Barnes (Ross) would go on to play Greg in all the Brady Bunch movies.
RC Hopgood was born in Puerto Rico, and lived in Texas, Mexico and Colorado. He has a BFA from Rice University and is the author of “Bellows: Fables from the Musical Underground,” (Hmm, 2013) and a year-long 52 entry blog about his upbringing in Puerto Rico, “Cuentos del Barrio Machuchal” (2014-2015). Currently he lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and is working on a long-form fictional piece about a book that changes its words every time someone reads it.