From Being Cindy Brady to Being a Pro-Trump MAGA

Donald Trump is really bringing his famous supporters out of the closet now

Okay I wasn't surprised to see famous people from my youth like Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, Kevin Sorbo, and Scott Baio become full-on Donald Trump supporters because they have been openly right-wing douchebags for years so it was only natural that they would embrace the Make America Great Again movement. But to see someone like former child star Susan Olsen get sucked into this as well had grabbed my attention because, unlike the others, she never acted obnoxious or anything like that.

Susan Olsen was a child star who is most famous for her role as Cindy Brady on the hit 1970s TV sitcom The Brady Bunch. I used to watch The Brady Bunch as a child on Friday nights but I only did so to kill time while waiting for the latest episode of another TV series that followed that show—The Partridge Family. While I thought that The Brady Bunch was okay, I liked The Partridge Family much better because of the cool music that the family performed on stage each episode and that multicolored bus they rode around in from gig to gig. Also David Cassidy was such a dreamboat to look at and he was way more handsome than any of the boys on The Brady Bunch (and that includes the oldest boy, Greg Brady). Anyway, my feelings about The Partridge Family aren't really relevant to this particular post so I'm going to move on.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, the basic premise of The Brady Bunch was that a blonde-haired widow with three blonde-haired daughters met a dark-haired widower with three dark-haired sons. As the intro song to each episode explained, the two single parents fell in love, got married, and moved in together with their combined children and Alice the housekeeper.

The Brady family made integrating their blended family incredibly easy while smiling their way through each episode, which is a far cry from what blended families frequently go through in real life.

The Brady Bunch became so popular that it remained on the air for five years. It even led to an animated spin-off series called The Brady Kids, which were voiced by The Brady Bunch actors, that ran concurrent on Saturday mornings with the original series for one year.

After The Brady Bunch was canceled by ABC in 1974, it had undergone a few revivals but none of them have ever lasted as long as the original series.

Which brings us to Susan Olsen. She recently appeared on a podcast called Walk Away Campaign where she claimed that there was going to be yet another Brady Bunch revival on CBS. Olsen claimed that this revival would've included her character Cindy working as a libertarian podcaster, one of her sister Jan's children coming out as transgender, and one of the other Bradys was going to have a black spouse. She also said she wanted this scenario where she would be a libertarian, her brother Greg would be a Reagan Republican, and her sister Jan would be a liberal. But the network had killed it due to her support of Donald Trump, her controversial stands on the COVID-19 vaccine (yes, she's an anti-vaxxer) and the LGBTQ community. Her whole acting career has been unfairly impacted because of who she wants to become the next president of the United States.

In Susan Olsen's world she could've been the rare child star who successfully made the transition to adult roles in hit movies, just like fellow former child actor Jodie Foster, if it weren't for those meddling woke anti-Trump, anti-MAGA Hollywood executives thwarting her ambition to become Hollywood's greatest star of the late 20th century-early 21st century for political reasons.

While she made it sound like she had lost her acting career due to being a Trump supporter, if you look at her Internet Movie Database page, you'd have to wonder how much of an acting career she actually had in the first place. Before landing her most famous role as Cindy Brady in 1969 she had made guest appearances in TV episodes of Ironside, Julia, and Gunsmoke. She also made an uncredited appearance as Auditioning Singer in the 1969 Elvis Presley film The Trouble With Girls.

Even if you buy the story that being a longtime Trump supporter had ruined Olsen's once-promising acting career, here are a few facts. Aside from a brief ill-fated presidential run on the Reform Party ticket in 2000 and briefly flirting with running for president in 2011 (where he repeated that birther nonsense about then-President Barack Obama being born in Kenya and not Hawaii), Donald Trump's current political career didn't really begin until 2015 when he made that infamous trip down the escalator at Trump Tower announcing his candidacy while denouncing Mexicans as being rapists and drug dealers.

What was Olsen's acting career like between 1974 (the year that The Brady Bunch went off the air) and 2015 (when Trump ran for president)? Again, if you take a quick look at her Internet Movie Database page, you'd see that after The Brady Bunch went off the air in 1974, she went on to reprise her role as Cindy Brady in The Brady Bunch Variety Hour in 1976-1977 (which lasted one year), The Brady Brides in 1981 (which was canceled after 10 episodes), and The Bradys in 1990 (which was canceled after one month).

Even after Trump became president, she was still able to appear in the 2019 reality TV show A Very Brady Renovation with the other surviving Brady Bunch cast members. That series dealt with the renovation of the house that was used for exterior shots of the original Brady Bunch series and all of the cast members appeared as themselves instead of their Brady characters. That show ran for seven episodes.

She did the occasional role that had nothing to do with The Brady Bunch but they were few and far between. She appeared as a litigant on an episode of the reality TV series Divorce Court. She made guest appearances on episodes of Pacific Blue, The Young and the Restless, and Child of the ‘70s. She occasionally appeared in TV movies with titles like The Great Halloween Puppy Adventure, Holiday Road Trip, and Blending Christmas. She appeared in a short 15-minute horror movie in 2009 called Zombo as Frumpy Woman. She also provided the voice of the Wolf Girl in the 2019 animated music video short Zoinks!

In an earlier interview she said that she had left acting by the age of 23 because she had become so typecast as Cindy Brady that she couldn't find new work. Her story isn't that unusual from the numerous other child stars from hit TV series who couldn't make the transition to adult roles because they became too typecast in the minds of directors who decided not to give them a chance. Politics has nothing to do with it.

Typecasting is the main reason why Susan Olsen's acting career was so limited outside of The Brady Bunch and its revivals. Of course acting talent has a lot to do with it as well. I don't know how versatile an actress Susan Olsen really is, whether she had ever taken professional acting classes at any point in her life, or whether she was ever even capable of taking on more challenging roles than just Cindy Brady.

At one point Susan Olsen got a gig with the Internet-based network LA Talk Radio where she became the co-host of a show called Two Chicks Talkin’ Politics. That gig could've been an excellent opportunity for her to put some distance away from her past Cindy Brady persona if it weren't for a certain incident which derailed that career. On one episode in 2016 she got into a heated discussion with openly gay actor Leon Acord-Whiting. After his appearance on the show Acord-Whiting criticized Olsen online, accusing her of spreading “outrageous misinformation” given her support for Donald Trump. He wrote “This isn’t just disagreeing on, say, tax plans or foreign policy. Susan Olsen spreads outrageous misinformation and it is dangerous and unprofessional.” Olsen responded by sending him a message that said,

“Hey there little p—sy, let me get my big boy pants on and Reallly take you on!!! What a snake in the grass you are you lying piece of s—t too cowardly to confront me in real life so you do it on Facebook. You are the biggest f–-t ass in the world the biggest p—sy! My D—k is bigger than yours Which ain’t sayin much! What a true piece of s—t you are! Lying f–-t! I hope you meet your karma SLOWLY AND PAINFULLY.”

Olsen was fired from the show after Acord-Whiting posted that message from her online.

The biggest irony about Olsen's display of homophobia is that Robert Reed, who played Olsen's father Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch, was a gay man who was HIV positive at the time of his death in 1992 from a rare form of colorectal cancer.

That previous homophobic incident was cited as the main reason why CBS had nixed another revival of The Brady Bunch, especially with her participation in it. When her agent suggested that there could be a way to circumvent CBS so that she could still take part in that revival she said that she was done, that revival was going to become a “woke” Brady Bunch, and she wanted no part of it.

An unnamed source close to the project said that the issue with casting Olsen was not due to her support for Trump, but rather her “controversial comments and hate speech, which she has noted she still stands by.”

Here's the thing. It sounds like CBS was more concerned about her previous homophobic statements than her professed support of Donald Trump. She may complain that she's being politically persecuted by being denied acting jobs due to her politics but when you consider the fact that politically conservative actors like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Tom Selleck were able to find work in Hollywood despite their political beliefs, the issue isn't the actor's personal political beliefs or which politician that actor supports in an upcoming election. The issue is openly showing hateful conduct towards someone else from a traditionally marginalized group without ever issuing any kind of a public apology for using homophobic or other types of prejudicial slurs. That's the kind of behavior that generally tends to alienate or completely turn off an actor's fans. It's possible that CBS didn't want to deal with Susan Olsen because had this revival with her participation become a reality, it would've been subjected to heated controversy including public protests and boycotts by the LGBTQ community.

And then there's the completely apolitical issue of whether there is really a major demand for yet another Brady Bunch revival. Each previous revival ended up being short-lived. The last such revival was in 1990 and that one only lasted one month. Three of the actors who played the parents Mike and Carol Brady and Alice the housekeeper are now deceased. The oldest living cast member, Barry Williams (who played Greg Brady), is now 70. Olsen herself is the youngest at 63. Would The Brady Bunch fans really want to see a new show about the Brady kids as senior citizens dealing with their adult children and grandchildren when that same audience had rejected previous shows about the Brady kids as young adults dealing with being newlyweds and thirtysomething adults dealing with jobs and raising families of their own?

And who on earth wants to see Cindy Brady as a libertarian podcaster? Or Greg and Jan having heated political debates at Brady family gatherings as a Reagan Republican and a liberal? I remember the original series was completely apolitical and the plots tended to be light-hearted. I don't recall the plots ever getting any more serious than dealing with the neighborhood bully or auditioning for the local talent show competition. Hearing Cindy Brady spewing right-wing libertarian talking points would be a pretty jarring experience.

As far as I can tell, based on the previous Brady Bunch revivals that flopped, most Brady Bunch fans prefer to watch reruns of the original sitcom when the Brady kids were all children growing up under the watchful eyes of parents Mike and Carol Brady and Alice the housekeeper.

This is another reason why I prefer The Partridge Family. That show was only aired for four years and that was it, other than those original episodes being released into syndicated reruns. No reunions, no sequels, no revivals, no updates on what the Patridges are doing now. They only did one series and they were completely done when it ended. Besides it would be hard to do a Patridge Family reunion now since Dave Madden, David Cassidy, and Suzanne Crough are all deceased.

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