As Schwartz explained in a 2002 Retrocrush interview (seriously, read the whole thing), the Brady Bunch was something of an aspirational show. "I think that people growing up might see a family that they would try to emulate because they have deficiencies in their own family. They don’t talk to their parents as well as the Brady kids talk to theirs. If they’re similar, they have something in common. Either way, families tune in to see The Brady Bunch. We just wanted an entertaining show that had certain moral qualities."
From a 2001 interview:
I thought I had a great idea. And it's still a great idea. It's people. Here's a serious show. It's serious in that Arabs and Jews have to learn to live together for they're stuck together. North Koreans and South Koreans, they have to learn. If you don't learn, you'll all die. So there's this philosophic basis -- this is not an afterthought, this is in the show. When the show first came on the air I got with regularity bachelor's degree, master's degree thesis from people in the theatrical area explaining what's the basis for "Gilligan's Island." Like I didn't know. It was carefully thought out, these seven people. That took me like a year to figure out who should be on the island. And it was all with a view towards the respect that people have to learn for each other because nobody is the same as anybody else. When would a billionaire sit down and have lunch with Gilligan, except if he had to? The same is true of a movie star and a professor. There's miles between them, but when they're stuck in the same place they have to learn to live together. That's what the show is about, people learning to live together....
The easiest show I ever developed was not "Gilligan's Island." That took a long time. "The Brady Bunch" was very simple. That was based on four lines I read in the Times, the LA Times, It was a filler item in the paper that said that that year some 29 percent of all marriages had a child or children from a previous marriage. And that's all I needed. Two sentences, three sentences gave me "The Brady Bunch" because I realized when you're talking about a third of all marriages, you're talking about a whole new sociological phenomenon.
I was so sure there would be 900 writers writing ideas based on that, that I raced to the typewriter and wrote the premise for "The Brady Bunch" and wrote the script as quickly as I could. And much to my surprise, nobody else even saw that item or it never meant as much to anybody else as it did to me. To me, it opened a new door in situation comedy. The premises were much easier to come by; they had not been done before.... "The Brady Bunch" isn't that different than "Gilligan's Island." It's two families that have to learn to live together in one case. In the other case it's seven strangers who have to learn to live together. I think that's the most crucial problem in the world today. Just take a look at these kids who go to school with guns and kill people because they don't know how to live together. Nations have to learn. We only have one planet to live on and we have to learn to live with each other or the planet will get blown up.
