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The Brady Bunch

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We're getting a gullet full of Brady Bunch reminiscences right now, catalyzed by the HGTV series "A Very Brady Renovation," https://www.hgtv.com/shows/a-very-brady-renovation/articles/brady-bunch-house-reveal.

So this raises again the old question: what happened to the exes?

I get the whole "blended family" thing. But there are in essence three possibilities here. Maybe Carol and Mike are a widow and widower; or maybe there are at least two exes who are father/mother of the Brady children; or perhaps there is an ex (or exes) on the one side of the blend, a death on the other side.

None of this was ever mentioned or even hinted at in the show.

I believe that in the world of fanfic there is a scenario in which Carol and Mike are both murderers -- maybe they murdered each others spouses. That certainly explains the official silence on the subject, the lack of visitation-themed episodes, etc.

This in turn has a Hitchcockian variant. Perhaps Carol and Mike were originally strangers who first met on a train. Each agreed to kill the other's spouse, since that would make motive impossible to establish. They later decided they had to marry, in order to create spousal immunity should the cops inquire into those deaths.

Do the kids even know? Ah, spin on from there, spinmeisters.

Subtext makes even the banal seem mildly amusing.

Maybe "Cousin Oliver" was actually a plant by the police, a "little person" pretending to be a child, to find the critical evidence and crack the case.


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