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Here's why Robert Reed wasn't in the final episode of The Brady Bunch
Reed had decided enough was enough.
While the cast and crew didn’t necessarily know it then, the episode “The Hair-Brained Scheme” would be the last in the ever-popular Brady Bunch series (Well, maybe not quite so popular at the time of their cancellation). However, absent from the episode is Brady family patriarch Mike Brady, played by Robert Reed. Well, in Barry Williams’s autobiography, Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, it was revealed that it was Reed’s choice not to be featured in the episode because...it wasn’t very good.
Williams described the last episode of the series and said, “We Bradys limped through our final episodes with a plot Robert Reed found so unbelievable and stupid that he flatly refused to appear in it.” In the actual episode, Greg suffers through a hair mishap, courtesy of his brother, and nearly has to suffer through his graduation with orange hair. But in classic Brady fashion, they’re able to fix it before the big day, and all is right in the Brady universe once more.
At the end of the episode, Carol adds in a haphazard explanation as to why Mike Brady isn’t in the episode, and according to the episode plot, missed his son’s graduation. Apparently, Mike was out of town, and couldn’t make it to see Greg’s big day.
However, it seems that while Mike Brady was gone from the episode, he certainly wasn’t forgotten by the cast and crew during the day of filming. Williams also wrote that while Reed refused to be in the episode, he still insisted upon being on set during the actual filming. Williams wrote, “He [Reed] did, however, hang around the set while the episode was being shot, grumbling about its idiocy.”
In an interview with People Magazine, Reed said of the show, “It was just as inconsequential as it can be. To the degree that it serves as a babysitter. I’m glad we did it. But I do not want it on my tombstone.”
Sherwood Schwartz, creator of The Brady Bunch, also remembered Reed’s issue with the episode in an interview with The Television Academy Foundation. He recalled that Reed called the story “outlandish,” “unbelievable,” and “ridiculous.” If that wasn’t enough, Schwartz also recalled Reed’s declaration on the morning of the shoot: “I won’t do the show.”
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And nobody was, or is.
Appreciated!
There was even a single taken from that album - Cindy (Susan Olsen) singing "Frosty the Snowman." Needless to say, it failed.