Poor Jan Brady. If you grew up watching “The Brady Bunch,” you know the Brady’s middle sister had her struggles, constantly overshadowed by beautiful older sister Marcia. In fact, long before social media, the phrase “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” went viral.
Now Jan’s Brady brothers are letting the world in on a secret. At least one of Jan’s trials and tribulations had to do with something happened in real life for actress Eve Plumb, who played Jan.
The Real Brady Bros Podcast Reveals Story Behind Episode
On the latest episode of the podcast “The Real Brady Bros,” hosts Barry Williams (Greg Brady) and Christopher Knight (Peter Brady) looked back at the episode of season three of “The Brady Bunch” where Jan Brady gets glasses.
It turns out the show’s writers came up with the episode just so Plumb could wear her own real glasses in the series.
“Was she wearing glasses in the first two seasons that she wasn’t allowed to wear because the character didn’t have them, and it finally got to the point where she really needed to wear glasses to perform, to see her way down the stairs?” Christopher Knight, 67, asked Barry Williams. “I don’t even know the answer to this. I’m gonna have to ask you.”
Willams, 70, couldn’t remember whether Plumb wore contact lenses in earlier seasons or just went without her glasses, but both agreed the script helped the young actress out.
“In this case, it’s a real article,” Knight said. “Eve wore glasses. And I gotta believe it was easier for her to wear those glasses as the character.”
Williams compared allowing Plumb to wear glasses as her character to other young cast members wearing braces onscreen that they had in real life. But Williams pointed out that ironically, the only episode of “The Brady Bunch” written about getting braces was about Maureen McCormick’s character, Marcia, getting braces. And in real life, McCormick never had to get braces.
Eve Plumb’s Glasses Made Things Tricky on Set
The Brady Bros went on to talk about the added complications of Eve Plumb wearing real glasses while playing Jan. “Because lighting on glasses bounces,” Knight explained. “If they have somebody who’s scripted, like Clark Kent wearing glasses, you know, back in the day, they’d just have frames. No glass inside of those frames to make it look like they had glasses.”
Knight goes on to say, “Clearly, Eve needed glasses. So, you know, as troubling as that might have been for the cinematographers with the lack of time that we had in setting up shots, they had to go for it.”
He continued. “So, I don’t know what kind of conversations happened between the Plumbs and [series creator Sherwood Schwartz] leading up to this and how far in advance it was that they signaled, you know, ‘Eve is suffering from not being able to [wear] glasses as her character.’ Maybe that was in the second season so that they were prepared for this in the third season.”
Nevertheless, Williams said that Plumb “looked terrific” in the first shot of Jan wearing her new glasses. “The glasses were, like, perfect, I thought,” he said. “They weren’t goofy at all. They really just looked like, ‘Oh, okay. Yeah. Stylish.’ ”
“Those were her glasses. Those are the glasses that she wore,” Knight added. “She looked good in them. You know, they didn’t need to change anything there. And she could see through her own glasses, so might as well use them.”
Here’s the Story.. of a Brady Podcast
Barry Williams and Christopher Knight have been taping weekly episodes of “The Real Brady Bros” podcast since 2021. They’ve recorded more than 220 to date.
Every week, the pair recap a particular episode of the iconic Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969 to 1974. The co-stars talk about “the production, the adventure, the misadventure, the reaction and how each show resonated with the viewers,” according to the description on Apple Podcasts.
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