A proposed Brady Bunch reboot was canceled after one of its stars says she walked away from the project because CBS wanted to turn her character into a “bigot”.
New York, US, 31st October 2024, ZEX PR WIE, In a recent interview with Brandon Straka, Susan Olsen, who played the youngest Brady daughter Cindy Brady, says CBS sent her to “re-education” training because of comments she made privately after a political debate on her show on LA Talk Radio.
According to Olsen, she hosted a gay man on her show who despises Donald Trump, and claimed that gays are in danger of being harmed by the former president and his supporters. The interaction between Olsen and the unnamed gay man became heated, but during the commercial break Olsen says the man “fist bumped” her, and excitedly proclaimed, “I can’t believe I’m debating Cindy Brady!”.
After the show ended however, Olsen claims the man took to social media and claimed that Olsen was a dangerous person who needed to be removed from her position at the radio station because of her support for former president Trump.
At that point, Olsen says she became upset and sent the man an angry email with a gay slur, which she acknowledges, “was a horrible thing to say”. The former Brady Bunch star then goes on to explain how despite decades of advocacy for the gay community, including fighting for marriage rights and being one of the first people to visit and embrace AIDS patients who were dying in hospitals at the beginning of of epidemic, the media grabbed hold of the story after the man published the private email with the slur- and Olsen was labeled an anti-gay bigot.
The incident resurfaced years later when the Brady Bunch reboot began moving into development. Olsen says she really liked the initial concept for the show. “We all had a hand in our characters… we did define our political ideologies.” Olsen went on to tell Straka, “Cindy was a podcaster. Not quite as successful as Joe Rogan, but doing well. And a libertarian.”
But as the show moved closer to production, Olsen says CBS discovered the incident from LA Talk radio, and began expressing their belief that she needed to be pulled from the pending reboot.
“They came back and said, ‘would you be willing to take a course in… I guess political correctness’”, Olsen recalls, while also joking with Straka that CBS was really proposing “re-education camp”.
“But you know what? I actually did. I thought, hey, it will green light the show- this is the least I can do for my siblings”, referring to her Brady Bunch co-stars. However, before she could accommodate the network’s request that she take the course, Olsen says CBS then did a web search on her- coming back with 50 pages of her political opinions they found objectionable- most of which having to do with the Covid shutdowns and vaccine mandates.
“No. We can not have her. If we go forward with this project it will not be with her”, Olsen says CBS execs told her and her agent.
The final straw came later when one of the troubled reboot’s show runners told Olsen that perhaps they could get CBS to relent if they could write an episode in which Cindy is uncomfortable being around gay people, creating a “teachable moment” in which other characters in the show educate Cindy about gay people. Olsen says she knew immediately it was time to walk. “No”, she tells Straka, “I will not let you make Cindy a bigot”.
In the interview, Olsen also recounts a phone call from her Brady siblings. “We’re so sorry, but they will not budge. They just will not have you in this”, she recalls her tv family telling her. “I’ve been canceled. A role I’ve played for over 50 years, I can not play it now”, she painfully tells Straka.
Several times during the interview, Straka and Olsen compare her situation to the cancellation of Roseanne Barr from the reboot of her hit series Roseanne in 2018. Straka interviewed Barr in 2018 after she was fired from the Roseanne reboot.
In their conversation, Barr revealed to Straka how her character would be killed off by an opioid overdose when the show returned as “The Conners” in the fall.
Throughout Straka and Olsen’s revealing conversation, Olsen also shares memories of the Brady children’s reactions when learning that TV father Robert Reed was gay in real life, and that she and her tv sister Eve Plumb (Jan Brady) are not speaking, due to Plumb’s disapproval of Olsen’s support of Donald Trump.
Brandon Straka is best known for creating the #WalkAway Campaign in 2018, https://www.walkawaycampaign.com a social and political movement of former Democrats walking away from the party because it has become too far left.
Their full interview can be seen here.
