Eve Plumb on why it took 20 years for 'Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!' to go viral and how 'Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway' helped her leave the awkward Jan Brady behind
As the 'Brady Bunch' actress auctions off memorabilia from her career, she opens up about why Jan was the coolest Brady and how she was cast against type in 1976 as a 15-year-old prostitute.
As Eve “Jan Brady” Plumb chats with Yahoo Entertainment about the sale of her personal memorabilia at Julien’s Auctions, the conversation inevitably turns to many of the Jan-centric scripts available for bidding, all of which featured Jan as the most relatable — and therefore arguably the coolest — Brady sibling.
During The Brady Bunch’s run from 1969 to 1974, there were episodes about Jan feeling left out as a middle sister (“Lost Locket, Found Locket,” “Jan, the Only Child”); feeling insecure and unattractive (“Jan's Aunt Jenny,” “The Not-So-Rose-Colored Glasses,” “The Not-So-Ugly Duckling”); and searching for her true identity (“Try, Try Again,” in which she unsuccessfully attempted to be a ballet dancer, tap dancer, and actress, and the RuPaul’s Drag Race-spoofed “Will the Real Jan Brady Please Stand Up,” in which she unsuccessfully attempted to be a curly haired brunette). Unlike her golden-girl sisters, Marcia and Cindy, Jan had real teenage problems, and she regularly grappled with adolescent awkwardness on national TV.
“The thing that I like about Jan is that she's just unafraid to fail. She'll just keep trying!” Plumb chuckles.
But of course, the most coveted teleplay in Plumb’s Julien’s Auctions lot has to be “Her Sister's Shadow,” in which middle-schooler Jan, fed up with her teachers constantly comparing her to her pretty, perfect, and popular older sister, uttered the most famous one-liner in Brady Bunch history: “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
However, in a mind-blowing, Mandela Effect-like moment, Plumb clarifies that “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” didn’t become a viral catchphrase until two whole decades after “Her Sister's Shadow” first aired on ABC on Nov. 19, 1971.
“That line actually wasn't famous when we did the show, or after the show. It wasn't famous until it was a parody sketch on Saturday Night Live,” says Plumb. “It was only because it was in Saturday Night Live that it got popular. … It was Melanie Hutsell portraying Jan.”
Hutsell, who was a Saturday Night Live featured player from 1991 to 1993 and a main cast member from 1993 to 1994, starred in a Chicago production of The Real Live Brady Bunch in 1990, and once she was hired by SNL, her appearance as an increasingly manic and unhinged Jan Brady on “Weekend Update” immortalized Plumb’s jealous exclamation. Plumb also notes that the real Marcia, played by Maureen McCormick, never actually uttered another famous line that became a Brady meme: “Sure, Jan.” That line is in fact from a scene in the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel, in which Jan (played by Jennifer Elise Cox) fibbed about the fictional long-distance boyfriend first mentioned in “The Not-So-Ugly Duckling,” George Glass.
“You have to remember, The Brady Bunch was really not popular or considered interesting at the time,” says Plumb, explaining why it took so long for the show’s catchphrases and plot lines to go viral. “It’s only after the fact that all of these themes and digging into it and discussing and figuring it out has happened. … [The series] was not considered relevant. It was considered saccharine, and the concurrent shows were like Mod Squad and other hard-hitting TV shows, so we were seen as filler. … It was considered very safe, and I think that was our lane and we stayed in it.” (Plumb says the time, the only thing deemed edgy or interesting about The Brady Bunch — which didn’t even feature a toilet in the bathroom, it was so G-rated — was the fact that the parents, Mike and Carol, shared a bed onscreen.)
Plumb got her chance to be edgy — and leave her awkward Jan character behind for good — in 1976, two years after The Brady Bunch went off the air, when she was cast against type as a 15-year-old prostitute in Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (scripts and ephemera from that production are also up for auction).
Plumb was still in high school at the time of her Dawn audition — she actually celebrated her 18th birthday on the Dawn set — and it was her first big post-Brady role. The made-for-TV movie got a 46.7 share in the national Nielsen ratings — right behind Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and two notches above The Bionic Woman — and opened the door for more mature projects, like 1978 miniseries Little Women.
“When I got [the role of Dawn], that was really great. I was really fortunate, because it was such a departure from Jan, and that was a big shocker. That was really, really quite the shocker for everyone. But it was great. As an actress, I'd been playing roles since I was 6, so it was great to get a new challenge,” says Plumb, who had to do a screen-test despite her years of TV experience.
“I think it was very fortunate that that came along for me, because it was the instant transition from Jan to adult, which is very difficult for a lot of child actors to make, because once you're not cute anymore, nobody wants you. So, that was very fortunate for me, so that's why I did it. It was a very quick, giant step.”
But Plumb will of course always be best known as Jan Brady — a role she’s reprised over the years in spinoffs like The Brady Brides, A Very Brady Christmas, and The Bradys — so however long it may have taken catchphrases like “George Glass,” “Sure, Jan,” and “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” to go viral, they’re all a permanent part of the pop-culture lexicon now. And that is ironic, considering that one of the items up for sale in Plumb’s auction is a Los Angeles Times article from 1969 that declared The Brady Bunch “the worst” of a slate of new TV shows debuting that year.
“We can just stop worrying about that now,” Plumb laughs. “I think it's hilarious when a pronouncement has proved wrong.”
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