TUNKU VARADARAJAN: The Brady Bunch Ambassadors: Florence Henderson’s TV family brought America to India.

‘Here’s the story, of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls.” That’s the opening fragment of the theme song from “The Brady Bunch,” a sitcom that was, somehow, so much more than a sitcom.

The show, which ran from 1969-74 on ABC, offered a vision of America that left a lasting civilizational impression on the minds of young viewers, perhaps especially in the non-Western world. Watching reruns in India as a young boy, I formed some of my first clear ideas of America from “The Brady Bunch”—rose-tinted ideas, for sure, but also important ones. . . .

Theirs was an irrefutable wholesomeness that was at odds with the tumult outside the Brady home, a conciliatory counterpoint to the America of the Vietnam War. Cynics might say this was propaganda, but why sneer at a show that portrayed an unapologetically stable America that kept going without being torn apart? There was enough rawness on the TV news at the time; you didn’t need the Brady home as a canvas for Vietnam.

The Bradys’ America was a wondrous, clean-cut place: a kitchen with all the modern conveniences; an unruffled but not switched-off mom; an unflappable father who was an architect, a cool job in contrast to the salaried drudges who made up American manhood on TV. All this was presented in carefully curated multicolor, right down to the Brady women’s emphatic blondeness, a symbol of the Old Order in an increasingly multiracial America.

Viewers in the Third World marveled at the egalitarian treatment given to Alice, the housekeeper, a mere “servant.” Those of us with TV sets and maids were disconcerted, wondering why our own help was treated so differently.

Well, that’s America for you.