What Really Happened to ‘The Brady Bunch’s First Spouses? The Dark (Carol-Endorsed) Theory

For a show whose entire premise rests on the unique challenges of blended families in mid 20th-century America, the makers of The Brady Bunch weren’t too keen to discuss exactly what leads to those blended families. We learn in the first episode that Mike Brady’s wife died, but we never find out how or even when. In fact, the way they talk about her — “I don’t want you to forget your mother,” Mike tells Bobby, and “Your mother would be very proud of you” — she might just be on a secret mission from which she can never return. It was Vietnam, after all.

Even weirder, the fate of Carol Brady’s first husband is never mentioned at all. Creator Sherwood Schwartz wanted her to be divorced, but the same network that was all too happy to cash in on changing family dynamics was still scared to broadcast the D-word in 1969, so as a compromise, they just never addressed it. That meant never addressing the realities of divorce, however, such as custody arrangements. The Brady girls’ father completely vanished from their lives, so regardless of what Schwartz intended, he was either a real piece of shit or dead. 1996’s A Very Brady Sequel suggests he was The Professor of Gilligan’s Island, but we don’t have to stand for that.

Whatever the case, no one ever mentions their piece of shit/dead dad, nor for that matter is Mike Brady’s first wife ever mentioned again. That’s kind of weird, right? Whatever happened to Carol’s husband happened three years before the start of the series, but that’s not the kind of trauma that tends to just go away for children or even spouses. Something is being forcibly suppressed, and one writer believes it’s because the Bradys wanted their spouses out of the picture.

Writing for Slate in 2018, Craig Pittman argues that Mike and Carol, having met and fallen in love under unknown circumstances, did a Stranger on a Train on each other’s spouses. Perhaps, “as an architect, Mike knew how to weaken a balcony railing or sabotage a staircase, making Carol’s husband’s death look like an accident,” while Carol may have staged “a phony mugging outside Sam’s meat market,” he suggests. After all, divorce was so taboo that you couldn’t even talk about it on TV. If you wanted out of a marriage, it was either expulsion from society or murder.

It seems like it would look pretty suspicious for these two to marry after both of their spouses’ bizarre and sudden deaths; after all, the whole point of Strangers on a Train was that they were completely unconnected to each other, so legally entwining their lives later would really throw a wrench into the plot. Pittman argues that they simply waited until “the heat died down,” and besides, Carol Brady actress Florence Hendersen herself is on board. 

She “always said I just got rid of him,” she explained in 2015, joking that, “I killed my husband. I was the original black widow!” 

She definitely would have killed those bodysuits.