‘DWTS’ fan-favorite reveals the unexpected way his iconic show ended: 'I thought we were coming back'
'Dancing With The Stars' alum Barry Williams is shedding light on the end of his 1970s show 'The Brady Bunch.' Williams, who was one of the fan favorites on Season 32 of 'DWTS,' played the role of Greg Brady for five seasons on the iconic ABC sitcom. In a recent conversation with People magazine, Williams said that when production paused in 1974, he assumed they would return. During the interview, Christopher Knight asked co-stars Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen, and Williams, "Do you guys remember finding out? Because I think we just went on hiatus. Probably not expecting to come back, or did we know we were?" In his response, Williams said, “I thought we were coming back for sure."
Soon afterward, Olsen quipped, "I had the feeling that we wouldn't be coming back. And I was hoping that we wouldn't." While speaking about their contracts, Williams further elaborated, "We all were under five-year contracts. So the five years had run. For there to be another season, there would've had to be new negotiations." At that point, Olsen interrupted Williams mid-sentence and said, "And we would've had to be paid."
Williams recalled, "We stopped shooting in February. They would've had to start up again in June. There's a little window in there to do some negotiations. So I think we broke thinking maybe we would know rather quickly if we're picked up or not because they'd have to start negotiations. It was probably a month or two before we probably found out that we weren't being picked up. And so you're not even around one another; it just ... It's gone. It dissipates. There's no real, formal exit or time to feel."
After the show's conclusion, the cast reunited for the spinoff variety series 'The Brady Bunch Hour,' which premiered in 1976. In addition to this, Williams and the cast of the show also reprised their roles in TV movies 'The Brady Girls Get Married’ (1981) and 'A Very Brady Christmas' (1988). Williams was also seen playing the character of Greg Brady in the short-lived 1990 drama called 'The Bradys.'
In a 2018 interview with Closer Weekly, Williams expressed his disappointment over the cancellation of his show, 'The Brady Bunch.' At that point, Williams shared, “I thought Greg was going to go to college. I was looking forward to getting out of the house and maybe moving into my own show and things like that, because I had those kinds of ambitions. And we had been promised that it would go another year. And then they pulled the plug.”
In the same interview, Williams also revealed that after he got the bad news through a phone call, he headed to Paramount Studios to clean out his dressing room. Then, Williams also mentioned that he had to take permission from the security guard to go through and that his name on his usual parking space was replaced by someone else's name. Williams continued, “I was gone. I was out, and that was a major wake-up call. A wake-up call to the business and what to expect. Here today, gone tomorrow. Done.”
