Jan Had the Juiciest Storylines on ‘The Brady Bunch,’ According to the Show’s Brothers

Forget Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. When it came to The Brady Bunch’s most fascinating storylines, stars Barry (Greg) Williams and Christopher (Peter) Knight believe the juiciest plots belonged to Jan, Jan, Jan. 

The hosts of The Real Brady Bros podcast did a listener Q&A this week (their 61st — Brady stans have lots of questions), and a guy named Bruce Davis posed this query: “Perhaps you guys have not thought about the show in this way, but I figure I’ll ask anyway. Which Brady boy and which Brady girl do you think had the most interesting storylines overall?”

Williams was quick with his answer, at least on the girls’ side. “I think Jan had the most interesting storylines,” he said. “Because Jan had more depth, she was more troubled. She was a middle child in the classic kind of sense. You know, a little bit sisterly toward Cindy, but kind of competitive with Marcia. She always seemed to have a lot of angst, which I think gave her some depth in the show.”

Compare Jan’s ennui with the bland personalities of her sisters. “Marcia, she was, like, the ultimate California beach girl — cute and nice and popular,” Williams said. “And Cindy, kind of eavesdropping, tattletale, not very bright through most seasons — character-wise, not the person. So Jan, I think, had interesting waters to navigate.”

The writers and producers of the satirical Brady Bunch Movie got that memo. While the parody mimicked sitcom plot lines for each of the kid characters, it was Jan’s weirdo anxiety that drove the parody’s main plot. Jan was the ultimate outsider, disconnected from everyone else in the Brady clan and perhaps reality itself. 

Knight agreed with Williams’ assessment. Greg and Marcia had built-in personalities — the oldest kids, the leaders. Same with Cindy and Bobby. As the youngest children, their job was to be cute. But the writers had to work harder with middle kids Jan and Peter.

“In the middle, there’s no definition. You can go any number of ways, by there not being a cliché definition of what middle actually is,” explained Knight. The writers tried to solve that problem by throwing a lot of angst at Jan to see what stuck, and “they also threw it to Peter, you know, not having a personality.”

One of Knight’s trademark episodes is when Peter tries to figure out exactly what his personality is, inexplicably adopting a Humphrey Bogart accent as part of his quest. Middle-aged comedy writers were playing out some weird fantasies in 1973. 

But Peter wasn’t as well-defined as Jan. In fact, Knight says, Peter and Bobby were “kind of interchangeable.” In a lot of ways, young Bobby was more compelling, idolizing the violent outlaws of the Old West like Jesse James. 

It’s too bad The Brady Bunch didn’t last a few more seasons. A teenage Bobby knocking over local banks might have catapulted him past Jan as the most interesting Brady of all.