The Brady Bunch in the White House (2002) review

Dir. Neal Israel

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★

You can scold me for not liking a movie you loved. You can say I oversaturate multiple platforms with my nonsense. The one thing you can never hold against me is my cognizant desire not to flood your social media, or even my website, with political rants. I’m smart enough to know you don’t care what I have to say in that realm. I know my lane and I will Paul Walker myself in it.

Consider my contribution to this election season a review of a TV movie — based on one of the most popular sitcoms of all-time — that is so irrelevant you probably never heard of it.

The Brady Bunch in the White House is the distant follow-up to the one-two punch of The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel in the mid 1990s. Produced by Paramount Television and aired on Fox as late as Thanksgiving 2002, it served as the dying breath of a franchise that refused to die. Consider the fact that the eminently popular sitcom only ran for five years (1969–1974) and then try and recall the deluge of spinoffs (The Brady Brides, The Bradys) that followed and you have to marvel how many spinoffs and tangential branches this tree grew.

The first two Brady movies proved effective because they had the right satirical bite to take friendly jabs at the vanilla concept and oversimplified moralism that permeated the show. The Brady Bunch in the White House is content with just being completely bonkers, in a way that is impressively unamusing. It’s so cheaply conceived and bafflingly plotted that you wonder not if, but how many times gun-for-hire director Neal Israel used the phrase “why are we bothering?” to his cast and crew.

Consider the scene where President Randolph (Dave Nichols) is to be inaugurated into the White House, with Mike Brady (Gary Cole) as his VP. Stock footage from past inaugurations are interspliced with shots of close-ups showing the Brady family (but not the Randolph family?). It resembles that of a student film. There’s a good chance your city councilmember’s take-home pay was greater than the budget for this mess.

The story segues from young Bobby (Max Morrow) stumbling upon a winning lottery ticket to Mike quelling the family’s excitement by exhausting every avenue to find its rightful owner. Unable to track down the winner (he’s on death row), Mike donates the $67 million windfall to charity, attracting the attention of President Randolph. At a press conference, he decides to make the good-hearted Mike Brady his VP, as he’s up for reelection. On the inauguration stage, Randolph is blackmailed into resigning, so without much rebuttal from the crowd or the party, Mike Brady becomes president and of course picks Carol (Shelley Long) as his VP.

Such a laughably lazy premise would only be made worse by a lack of jokes. The Brady Bunch in the White House doesn’t care to supply any. Screenwriters Lloyd J. Schwartz and Hope Juber conjure up an appallingly low-stakes political comedy that boils down to the Bradys running roughshod in the White House. Peter (Blake Foster) crushes on a political aide, Jan (Ashley Drane) realizes status doesn’t improve her public image, a scorned Speaker of the House (Saul Rubinek) plots Mike Brady’s downfall, Alice has never been so lifeless and inessential, and cutesy-mutesy Cindy (Sofia Vassilieva) saves the day.

As the political landscape grows more divisive each and every day, there’s one thing on which everyone seems to be in agreement: The Brady Bunch in the White House sucks. Its existence should merit a chuckle, not an 88-minute endurance test for anyone who values their time.

My review of The Brady Bunch Movie
My review of A Very Brady Sequel

Starring: Gary Cole, Shelley Long, Chad Doreck, Autumn Reeser, Blake Foster, Ashley Drane, Max Morrow, Sofia Vassilieva, Saul Rubinek, Tannis Burnett, and Dave Nichols. Directed by: Neal Israel.