Here’s the story of the most unrealistic family in the world, and yet for the five years between 1969 and 1974, families welcomed the The Bradys into their home every week. Inspired by a newspaper article about the percentage of marriages that brought children from a previous relationship or marriage into new marriages, creator of The Brady Bunch, Sherwood Schwartz thought this was the perfect scenario for a television sitcom.

Widowed architect, Mike Brady and his three boys: Greg, Peter and Bobby welcomed Carol and her three girls, Marsha, Jan and Cindy into their family. One of the interesting things about Mike and Carol was that as an audience, we never quite knew what happened in Carol’s prior marriage.

Schwartz intended her to be a divorcee, but with the role of women in television still being rather touchy during the 1960s and early 1970s, the network wouldn’t go for it, and Carol’s past remained a mystery all throughout the series.

With the help of the family housekeeper, Alice, raising the six children together got off to a rocky start, but anyone who’s ever tried to integrate children from a previous marriage into another family setting could have told them that was going to happen. The first season focused heavily on the blending of the two families into one, over the following four years the issue seemed to fade from the show save for the occasional mention. The children took to calling their new prospective parents “Mom” and “Dad” without a hitch, just as perfect TV children should.

Despite the unrealistic tone of the series (come on, I don’t care how much an architect made back in the 1970s, Mike Brady could never have made enough cash by himself to support a family of eight, plus a live-in housekeeper,) The Brady Bunch was an entertaining fable-brand series. With each episode teaching both parents and children a valuable life-lesson, young audiences across the nation learned about the dangers of lying, vanity, envy and tattling, while also coming to grip with important family values.

The Brady Bunch is still a well-known show more than thirty years after it’s conception, but during it’s five-year run on ABC, its ratings were actually on the low end, and it never won any significant awards. It was during re-run syndication that it actually gained worldwide popularity, as it often aired in the afternoons, allowing children to tune-in just after school. One sad note about the series was that it was so unrealistic that the network actually had a form letter on hand they saved to send out to the many children unhappy with their home situation that wanted to run away and live with the Bradys. I mean, really. Who could blame them. The Bradys had the perfect life. No matter what they did, their parents always forgave them, and everyone had a good laugh.  No one in my house was laughing that time I got an “F” in Algebra. In fact, I think my dad is still mad about that twenty years later.

Even if you’ve seen every episode, tuning into The Brady Bunch on TV Land is still a pretty popular pastime. Watching Peter’s voice crack when he starts going through puberty, or seeing Marsha get hit in the face with that football still make me laugh. The Bradys were a great escape from reality–a peek into a perfect world with a perfect family, and while it set the tone for a number of sitcoms in the following years, no other show would ever quite capture the wacky essence that was The Brady Bunch.