For those of you who don't know, Mr. Sherwood Schwartz is the prolific television sitcom visionary who created The Brady Bunch. I submit that the Schwartz design doctrine, that permeates the series, is the single best example of what might be called the Neo-Retro-Post Modern-Reactionary Kitsch Gestalt. In my neighborhood, we simply refer to this as "Schwartzism" for short.

Why hasn't The Brady Bunch gone out of style? Why does the show's hokey design still haunt us some 25 years later? And what is it about the Bradys that makes them so undeniably compelling? It might be a little like Louis Armstrong's famous definition of jazz: "If you have to ask, I can't tell you."

One of the things that makes The Brady Bunch an enduring classic is that it never referenced actual current events or fads, but rather focused on topics that were significant to any generation of kids. The show is as non-relevant today as it was originally. Its cornball humor was not a result of a shocking lack of talent among the writing staff. It was rather a deliberate component of a complex design whose overall purpose was to offer the audience a soothing, calming, challengeless and appealingly bland escape into a deceptively plausible fantasyland. In a sense, it's the meatloaf and mashed potatoes of television-comfort TV that seems to get better and better with repeated viewing.

I'm convinced one can't truly begin to understand the current faddish design culture until one understands the Bradys. This might help explain all the fuss young designers are paying to the mid-70's design aesthetic. (Hmmm. "1970's Design"…perhaps that's a contradiction of terms? Forget I said that.)

In any case, whether you watched the Bradys when they originally aired or caught them in reruns, those who grew up with the show understand what I'm talking about. No other single television program combines the high camp nostalgia, simplistic morals, timeless plot lines and staggeringly bad fashions as The Brady Bunch. Sure we laugh now, but the more I study the show the more I'm convinced that Sherwood had a secret plan — a subtle, brilliant, devilishly calculated plot to influence future "hipster" designers years after the show was unceremoniously cancelled. Am I crazy? Perhaps. But let me share with you a few observations that might make you reconsider your pop culture design roots.

Typography
What is it about that distinctive Brady font? I can't put my finger on it, but whenever I see those credits roll, I'm overwhelmed with a comfy feeling I associate with my one-piece red flannel pajamas. When Friday nights arrived, my sister and I would religiously don our jammies and prepare for the beloved ABC line up. It all started at 8:00pm with the Bradys; followed at 8:30pm by The Partridge Family; at 9:00pm we entered Room 222; at 9:30pm we watched The Odd Couple; and if Mom and Dad were out (and the babysitter was progressive), you could stay up late and try to decipher the sexual innuendoes of Love American Style at 10:00. But back to the Brady font. It's a san serif that's not taking it's self too seriously. Just like the Bradys, this is typography that is childlike, innocent and sexless. Unlike the title designs we saw afterwards on The Partridge Family (which was a blatant attempt to capture the free-love "groovy" tone of the shirtless David Cassidy era), the Brady font was decidedly unhip.

Nowadays, every young designer I meet considers this Brady "sitcom" font a cool revisionist choice. Thanks to Sherwood Schwartz's typographic pseudo-naivete, these Brady titles set the gold standard for many of today's alternative band CD covers and "hep" xeroxed posters hastily stapled to telephone poles in the East Village.

Lighting Design
Schwartz's shameless disregard for realistic exterior sets and lighting design is legendary. Even as a kid, I knew darn well that something was wrong with the sun in the Brady universe. First grade science taught us that when you walk outside a single light source makes you cast a single shadow. Yet in the biazzaro design world of Sherwood Schwartz, actors cast as many as six shadows when they stepped "outside" into the "backyard." At the time the series originally aired, many critics assailed this unrealistic lighting as yet another glaring example of Sherwood's cheapo approach to series television. After all, if you throw up a million lights to cover every square inch of the set, you don't have to spend precious shooting time worrying whether Cindy's golden curls were not evenly lit when she made a cross from the teeter-totter to the swings. You only had to worry about the actors getting heat exhuastion.

Yet in hindsight, this stunning use of artificial lighting can be viewed as yet another perfectly logical facet of Schwartzian stylization. The overall effect was that of total flatness. Now...what is the singular design element that is the hallmark of the current hit TV show South Park? Yes, my friends, flatness.

Art Direction
Just as the Brady's family dynamic defied reality, so did the show's art direction. It seemed everything was turned up a notch higher than the laws of physics would reasonably allow. The colors were a little too inorganic (the bright orange cabinets in the kitchen, the bright green Astroturf in the backyard), the decorative pieces were a little too tacky, and the incongruent mismatching of the household furniture was a little too odd. (Colonial themed in the living room juxtaposed to the "mod" Lucite tables and chairs we saw in the den just a few steps away.) Was this the result of Mike Brady's inability to furnish his home tastefully on his meager architect's salary? Of course not. This eclectic set design was the brainchild of our man Schwartz, and everyone knows he's a millionaire many times over.

Schwartz's interior stylings have influenced the work found in every high-priced trendy Park Avenue furniture store today. Doubtful? Pick up a copy of I.D. magazine and tell me some of those crazy chair designs wouldn't be at home in the Brady's Californian duplex.

And so no matter how you slice it, virtually all aspects of today's design zeitgeist can be traced to some origins found in The Brady Bunch. I'm serious.

And may the Schwartz be with you.

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As the Vice President, Creative Director at Nick at Nite Online, David Vogler knows a thing or two about classic TV. His favorite Brady episode is a toss up between the one where Peter and Bobby photograph a UFO and any episode that features Marcia dancing in provocative skin-tight spandex bellbottoms.

From The AIGA Journal; originally published Summer 2002

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