“The Brady Bunch” is one of those shows that helped define the 1970s. It put the idea of a functioning blended family more firmly into the zeitgeist, but behind the scenes, things weren’t always peachy, especially between the show’s creator Sherwood Schwartz and Robert Reed, who played Brady family patriarch Mike Brady. In an interview with The Television Academy, Schwartz explained that Reed felt television was beneath him because he’d spent a few years with the famous Royal Shakespeare Company in England. He harbored ambitions of becoming a film star, and a sitcom in which he was a father to six kids was apparently the last role he wanted, but he was under contract with Paramount. He agreed to do the show, but he insisted on it being well made — so much so that he would refuse to film if everything wasn’t 100% accurate.
Schwartz claims that Reed would walk off the set if scripts weren’t factually correct, often using his Encyclopedia Britannica to double check things. The executive producer remembered being called to set to talk to Reed about a line involving strawberries. In the episode, Mike comes home to Carol (Florence Henderson) and Alice (Ann B. Davis) making strawberry jam. He was meant to say, “Smells like strawberry heaven,” but Reed refused because, according to his encyclopedia, strawberries don’t have an odor when they’re being cooked. “I said, ‘Bob, I just went through the whole set, you smell strawberries in the kitchen,'” Schwartz recalled. “He said, ‘Do you want me to believe you, or the Encyclopedia Britannica?'” They compromised on the line, with Mike ultimately saying, “I do believe I’ve died and gone to strawberry heaven.”
Reed also took issue with a scene featuring broken eggs
In the same interview with The Television Academy, Sherwood Schwartz recalled Robert Reed having a problem with a scene in which Mike slips and falls on some eggs that fall out of the refrigerator when he opens it. Reed apparently took issue with the gag because his encyclopedia stated that raw broken eggs are sticky when they break, not slippery, so Mike wouldn’t realistically slip on them. The scene was set up and needed to be blocked, so they tested the fridge mechanism to see if the eggs would fall out and break when Mike opened the door. While still trying to make his case to Schwartz, Reed slipped on the eggs and fell. Schwartz recalled Reed looking up at him from the floor and saying, “That doesn’t prove a thing!”
While they usually worked things out, there’s at least one instance of Reed refusing to film altogether. He’s credited in all 117 episodes of “The Brady Bunch,” but Reed doesn’t actually appear in the series finale. The plot of “The Hair-Brained Scheme” involves Greg (Barry Williams) buying a bottle of hair tonic from his brother Bobby (Mike Lookinland) that turns his hair orange right before his graduation. Reed reportedly found the plot so ridiculous that he wrote a passionate letter to Schwartz to protest it and he even refused to be in the episode. In the end, Schwartz revised the script and wrote Reed out. The fact that this ended up being the last ever episode of “The Brady Bunch” makes the absence of Mike all the more regrettable. Still, Reed will forever be remembered as half of one of TV’s most iconic sitcom couples.