• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, June 8, 2020

Merv Griffin would have loved Zoom. And Sherwood Schwartz might have loved it too (although I am a little less certain about him).

While participating in a Zoom meeting the other day, it suddenly dawned on me: This is just like “The Brady Bunch.”

My mind wandered (as it will in dull meetings), and I pictured myself glancing side to side and up and down at my Zoom compatriots. Hey, there’s Jan! Hi, Peter! How ya doin’, Cindy!

Sherwood Schwartz was the creator and executive producer of “The Brady Bunch.” But on the one and only occasion when he and I crossed paths, the subject of grids never came up.

The subject did arise, however, in a conversation with Merv Griffin. This was an interview conducted over the phone with Griffin in January 2007.

The topic for the interview was the announcement that Griffin, then 81, had developed a new quiz show for first-run syndication, the arena in which he had already made a fortune with “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”

Like “Wheel,” which was based loosely on the simple pencil-and-paper puzzle game known as Hangman, this new one was also adapted from a puzzle that ordinary people enjoyed every day. The new show was “Merv Griffin’s Crosswords.”

In our interview, I pointed out that in “Wheel,” “Jeopardy!” and now “Crosswords,” grids were vitally important. They were the way in which the shows and their puzzles -- and in the case of “Jeopardy!,” the show’s clues -- were presented.

He agreed that grids were important to all three shows. “I like grids!” he said emphatically, in that infectiously enthusiastic way he had when promoting his TV shows.

To him, grid displays helped organize the materials on these shows and then communicate them clearly in a visual way that was easy for viewers to read, understand and play along with.

Griffin died later that year -- ironically before his “Crosswords” show premiered that fall. 

The Zoom grids in which conference participants are presented in a “Brady Bunch”-like grid display would have appealed to Merv. I bet that before long, he would have thought of a new Zoom-based quiz show too.

Sherwood Schwartz created the famed “Brady Bunch” grid. But no such grid is evident in the opening titles for his other most famous show, “Gilligan’s Island,” or his other show featuring seven characters, the short-lived “Dusty’s Trail.” 

Of course, the “Brady Bunch” grid was made possible by the show’s nine characters (the ninth was housekeeper Alice -- Ann B. Davis, who is concealed by the “Brady Bunch” title in the image above).

I was enabled to have a conversation with Schwartz some time in the spring of 2000 by an astute publicist who sat me beside the great producer at a luncheon at the Waldorf in New York that was being held to promote the vintage TV shows on Nick At Nite and TV Land.

I have few memories of this event, other than that I had my picture taken with Mr. T (and not for the first time), and that the entertainment was provided by a rock band in which Tina Yothers, former child star of “Family Ties,” was the lead singer.

With regard to my conversation with Schwartz, I do remember him attempting to explain to me how his shows featuring an odd number of characters -- whether nine or seven -- were so designed according to a mathematical formula that only he seemed to understand.

(TV Blog note: I realize I have told this story at least once before here, but I like this story so much that here it comes again.)

From what I could make out of it: He felt that these odd numbers enabled him mathematically to produce storylines that would be sufficient in number -- centered on a single character, pairs of them, or other multiples -- to supply at least a single season of episodes and, hopefully, multiple seasons.

Unlike Merv Griffin, grids were not top-of-mind for Sherwood Schwartz, as far as I knew -- despite the one that is universally known from “The Brady Bunch.”

What might he have created from Zoom? Perhaps a show in which seven meeting attendees become stranded in a Zoom conference with no way out because one of them keeps derailing all of their best efforts to either escape or be rescued. That sounds about right.