‘The Brady Bunch’ stars don’t know if Mike ever adopted Carol’s daughters

Here’s a question that might keep you up at night: Did Mike Brady ever adopt Marcia, Jan, and Cindy on The Brady Bunch?

This became a matter of discussion on a recent episode of The Real Brady Bros, the rewatch podcast led by Barry Williams (Greg) and Christopher Knight (Peter), with special guests Susan Olsen (Cindy) and Mike Lookinland (Bobby) making an appearance.

While analyzing the pilot episode, Williams and Knight noted that Carol (Florence Henderson) is referred to as Mrs. Martin at the very beginning. (Martin being the name of her first husband; her maiden name was Tyler for those of you studying for an advanced degree in Bradyology.) Soon thereafter, all the ladies on the program, not just Carol, had the surname Brady — even though, as Williams said, “they were never adopted.”

But is that so?

“Well, we never knew,” Olsen retorted, with Knight declaring “too complicated!”

“We never had an episode about it,” Williams concluded.

Lookinland, however, wondered about the legalities.

“Forgive my ignorance, but don’t you [automatically] adopt your spouse’s minor children upon marrying them?” he asked.

“No,” Williams, who has been married three times, replied. “It’s a whole process with legal entanglements.”

Olsen came down strongly on the side that since the girls had the name Brady, they were adopted, and Williams remarked that on the show “we don’t ever refer to ourselves as stepbrothers, stepsister, or stepmom, stepdad.”

This opened a whole new can of worms, with Olsen suggesting that the producers “in fact, forgot” that the three boys and three girls were stepsiblings.

“They forgot?” Williams questioned, to which Olsen replied, “Yes, they did!”

She continued, “They had Jan [Eve Plum] say to Peter, ‘You’re my brother, and blood is thicker than water.’ And Eve and Chris went to the producers and said, ‘We’re not related.’ They’re like, ‘Oh, nobody remembers.'”

Knight recalled that incident, too.

“I took offense to it,” he said. “I thought that was the part of the show that really failed us as kids. And I was just 12 years old thinking at that time, they’re not really my sisters. I know growing up, I would have said, ‘You’re not really my sister.'”

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But then Knight got a little more philosophical.

“I look at it now, as an adult, and looking back on the show and its success — which is undoubtable — I recognize that the reason, in part, for that success is because we didn’t do that. It was all about getting along. And in getting along, having mom’s picture always up, referencing your real mom or your birth mom, is only gonna be a potential wedge issue. So it was completely put aside.”

Indeed, we can question if those Brady Bunch producers were speaking hyperbolically when they said “nobody remembers” or if they, as Olsen said, truly forgot. Or maybe they just wanted the pesky kids offering script notes to leave their office. Perhaps the best approach is to follow the Brady method and just “get along.”