Meet the ‘Other’ ‘Brady Bunch’: Fake Jan, Fake Cindy and The Wild World of Fill-In Bradys!

For most people, The Brady Bunch is as fixed as the multiplication tables. Six kids, two parents, one housekeeper, one astroturf lawn—and absolutely no substitutions. Barry Williams is Greg, Maureen McCormick is Marcia and so on, as naturally as night follows day and pork chops follow applesauce. Except… when it doesn’t.

Across two decades of sequels, spinoffs, animated adventures, variety hours and one very ambitious prime-time drama, the Brady family wound up with a surprising number of stand-ins. Some were temporary fill-ins, some became cult icons in their own right and some were just trying to get through a job that nobody expected would become Brady canon.

These are the other Bradys, the ones you may have forgotten or may never have known, but who helped keep the family together when the original kids were otherwise engaged.

Saturday mornings: when the Bradys sounded a little… different

In 1972, The Brady Kids jumped from prime time to Saturday morning, courtesy of Filmation, the studio famous for turning just about everything into a cartoon if you let them near a microphone and a drawing table. They did things their own way, including tight deadlines, even tighter budgets and a voice-acting bullpen that often included the children of company co-owner Lou Scheimer, who were around and willing to work for scale.

Enter Lane Scheimer, who became the animated Greg Brady in Season 2. Lane wasn’t trying to recreate Barry Williams’ performance—he wasn’t paid enough for that—but his Greg sounded earnest, slightly older and not someone destined for a long career in voice work. Lane’s sister Erika Scheimer also joined the Brady ranks in Season 2, voicing Marcia. Her take was softer and more sincere than Maureen McCormick’s bright, sitcom sparkle, which gave animated Marcia her own vibe—less “queen of the cheerleaders” and more “honor roll student with perfect handwriting.”

Together, the Scheimer siblings gave us the only version of the Bradys who could speak directly to pandas and a magic bird (voiced by F Troop star Larry Storch)—all before lunchtime.

Geri Reischl: The legendary, iconic, one and only ‘Fake Jan’

If the Scheimers are the deep cuts, Geri Reischl is the headliner. When The Brady Bunch Hour premiered in 1976—a Sid & Marty Krofft variety show so dazzlingly strange it deserves its own wing in the Television Hall of WTF—one Brady kid was missing, Eve Plumb having declined to return as Jan.

Kimberly Potts, author of The Way We All Became The Brady Bunch, writes, “Eve Plumb, now 18, didn’t say no to the variety show immediately. In fact, she initially said yes. The actress, who has a reputation for being the Brady kid least likely to continue Bradying, was pursuing acting and had recently starred in the 1976 NBC movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. The movie was a ratings winner for the network and there was already talk of a sequel. But she had also, the previous year, briefly toyed with starting a band—the Brady Bunch Three—with Olsen and Lookinland. She liked performing and thought the variety series might be fun. What she didn’t like was the idea of signing a contract that would potentially tie her to the series for five years. Okay, sure, in hindsight, it seemed unlikely The Brady Bunch Hour ever would have run for five seasons. But who would have predicted in 1969 that over 50 years later, The Brady Bunch itself would remain one of the most influential sitcoms in television history?”

In response, the producers turned to a young singer-actress who came in, nailed the audition and stepped directly into the sparkliest, most rhinestone-covered version of the Brady universe ever created. That actress was Geri Reischl, who wasn’t trying to impersonate Eve Plumb. She just played Jan the way the variety format demanded: bright, upbeat and completely game for anything involving sequins and synchronized movement.

Ted Nichelson, who, along with Susan Olsen and Lisa Sutton, wrote the book  Love to Love You Bradys: The Bizarre Story of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, explains,“She’d never done something like this before, and she was a singer and was already a dancer. So, for her, none of this was really too far of a leap and they really used Geri to their advantage, because she was a strong singer, and between her and Florence Henderson, they could really lead the group, with Barry Williams as a strong singer as well. You can hear a lot of Barry, Maureen, and Geri on the show. That’s really who’s leading the sounds of The Brady Kids at that point in time.”

Almost instantly, fans gave her a nickname: “Fake Jan,” and while most performers would have run the other way, Reischl embraced it—then spent decades turning it into a badge of honor. Today, she’s one of the most beloved footnotes in Brady history, a cult icon whose nine episodes cast a very long, glittery shadow.

Jennifer Runyon: Cindy Brady grows up

When A Very Brady Christmas reunited the original cast in 1988, viewers were thrilled to see the Brady house decorated for the holidays again. But one thing was different: Cindy Brady was suddenly Jennifer Runyon.

In their book Brady, Brady, Brady: The Complete Story of The Brady Bunch, father and son producing duo of Sherwood and Lloyd J. Schwartz write, “[We had to recast] Cindy for this movie. Susan Olsen, in real life, was getting married at the time of the filming, so she was replaced as Cindy by Jennifer Runyon. Susan also wanted the same amount of money as Maureen and Eve, who now got more money than the other kids since they had starred in the previous The Brady Girls Get Married and The Brady Brides. I couldn’t blame Susan, but if she got equal money, so would Barry, Chris and Mike, and the budget couldn’t sustain that. Susan chose to have her honeymoon.”

Adds Potts in her book, “Olsen rejected the lesser amount she was being offered, and then found out there would be a replacement Cindy when her agent saw casting notices. Jennifer Runyon, best known as Gwendolyn Pierce, the love interest for the titular manny played by Scott Baio on Charles in Charge, became Fake Cindy.”

Leah Ayres: Marcia, but more dramatic

Finally, we arrive at 1990 and a Brady chapter most people have forgotten—or blocked out. The Bradys was CBS’ attempt to reinvent the franchise as an hour-long drama, turning the once-wholesome sitcom into a series where the characters faced alcoholism, infertility, political scandals and housing crises. In other words, all the plots Mike Brady’s architecture degree never prepared him for.

“The good news,” notes Potts, “was that Susan Olsen returned as Cindy. But now it was Maureen McCormick’s turn to sit out a family reunion, deciding that this was just one Brady Bunch spin-off too many for her. That meant there would officially be fake versions for all three daughters in the Bradyverse now—none as beloved as Geri Reischl, the only fake commemorated with her own fake holiday. The Fake Marcia, Leah Ayres, had starred on the daytime soap The Edge of Night and the movie Bloodsport with Jean-Claude Van Damme.”