A Very Brady Renovation works as a curious form of closure

The Washington Post

HGTV's The Brady Bunch house restoration reality show, premiering Monday, is actually more interesting than its premise, says Hank Stuever. "Cheerful and inviting as the show might be, its mission is to put everything back the way it was, the way Mom and Dad had it — a final attempt to see if we can Make Brady America Great Again, down to finding the right pattern for the tastefully garish living room sofa, or using 3-D printing technology to restore the horse statuette that sits on a credenza, or hunting for the correct finial knobs that go on the backs of the dining room chairs," says Stuever. "A significant part of Monday’s episode is spent debating whether it will be acceptable to rebuild the famous Brady stairway with 11 steps instead of 12. To bring up the fact that none of it was ever real — that A Very Brady Renovation is indeed a costly and pointless attempt to put a layer of new fake on top of the old fake — is to look for logic where it need not exist. As the house comes together, the Brady cast’s faces reflect an almost profound wonder at the passage of time. The show is covertly speaking to us about mortality. It tells us something about the surprising degree to which the past can be retrieved, to say nothing of the lengths that 21st-century TV producers will go to retrieve it."

ALSO:

• Maureen McCormick considered buying the house -- she got an early head's up that it was for sale -- but declined when the bidding war started
• Funnily enough, all six Brady siblings had experience in the world of contracting, house flipping and home design
• The Brady Bunch staircase joins the cast in Today show visit
• Christopher Knight lived nearby the house for years before visiting for the first time in 1998
• Susan Olsen says all six TV siblings reunited after having made peace with their fame: "This is the first time the magic is back"