“The Brady Bunch” was one of the defining shows of the ’70s, but had little in the way of mystery — other than what happened to Fluffy the cat and why the iconic Brady house didn’t have any toilets, of course. There is one inscrutable matter that even series creator Sherwood Schwartz can’t clear up, however. While the opening theme fills viewers in on most of the blended Brady family’s history, we don’t get a word on either co-parents. An exchange between Mike (Robert Reed) and his son Bobby (Mike Lookinland) early in the 1969 premiere episode reveals that Bobby’s mom has died, but no details are given. As for Carol’s ex and the father of Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb), and Cindy (Susan Olsen), conflict between Schwartz and his network bosses kept his true fate a secret.
According to Barry Williams (Greg), the network balked at Schwartz’s initial plan to match the widowed Mike with a divorced Carol (Florence Henderson). Divorce rates in the U.S. more than doubled between 1960 and 1980, but the topic was still a sensitive one when “The Brady Bunch” was in its infancy. Williams says that the idea of a divorced Carol made ABC executives nervous. On an episode of the podcast “The Real Brady Bros” that he hosts with Lookinland and Christopher Knight, Williams said that the “network felt that a divorcee created too many problems for the series.” Custody disputes and weekend hand-offs would have seemed horribly out of place. Leaving Carol’s ex an invisible mystery meant there was no need to explain why they divorced.
A non-canon parody film addressed the mystery of Carol’s husband
Barry Williams added that in the end, “Sherwood never changed it, but they agreed to disagree, and it was left unhandled, which is why you never see [Carol’s ex] in our pilot episode.” The show also avoided mentioning Mike’s first wife; a quick scene with Bobby is the only time his mom is referenced. Carol’s missing spouse isn’t addressed at all until the non-canon 1996 parody film “A Very Brady Sequel.” In the spot-on sendup, a man (Tim Matheson) comes to the Brady house claiming to be Carol’s (Shelley Long) long-lost husband, Roy Martin.
She mentions that he was presumed “lost at sea,” and the man in their house turns out to be a scam artist. Florence Henderson decided to have a bit of fun with the topic of her first husband on a 2015 episode of “The HuffPost Show.” “I killed my husband,” she joked. “I was the original black widow.” She added that “nobody ever said” what happened to her first spouse, but analyst Craig Pittman thinks Carol as a murderer isn’t too outrageous a thought.
Pittman outlined his own bold theory in an article for Slate, explaining how Carol and Mike killed each other’s spouses so they could be together. He speculates that the two had agreed to “a crisscross killing.” “Divorce still carried a stigma. It would have ruined Mike professionally … How do you support six kids, two adults, and a housekeeper on one salary? You collect the insurance on two dead spouses, that’s how.” While all of this is no more than silly speculation about a purposefully omitted bit of backstory, it is a fun way to re-contexualize one of the best couples in sitcom history.
