Eve Plumb, the 68-year-old actress who portrayed Jan Brady in the classic 1970s sitcom The Brady Bunch, shares that the cast earns no residual payments from the show’s enduring reruns.
Details on Brady Bunch Residuals
In her recent memoir Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond, Plumb writes, ‘If I had a dime for every rerun episode, I’d pay off the national deficit. I don’t.’ She reinforces this on the PauseRewind podcast, stating, ‘We don’t make residuals.’
The ABC series aired from 1969 to 1974 and remains popular with new generations through syndication. Susan Olsen, 64, who played Cindy Brady, explains that pre-1973 industry practices limited payments to the first 10 reruns. ‘So [we’ve] made no money since then,’ she notes, with checks stopping in 1979.
Barry Williams, 71, who starred as Greg Brady, details the era’s compensation in his 1992 memoir Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg. ‘Salaries for sitcom actors have changed considerably since the ‘70s,’ he observes. In the final season, the highest pay among the child actors reached $1,100 per week. Williams earned $24,000 that year, calling it ‘not bad for a teenager’ after accounting for agent fees, taxes, and family contributions—enough for toys but not long-term security.
The Full Cast
Plumb, Olsen, and Williams appeared alongside Maureen McCormick (Marcia, 69), Mike Lookinland (Bobby, 65), and Christopher Knight (Peter, 68).
Contrast with Friends Cast
Plumb’s comments follow Lisa Kudrow’s revelation that she and her Friends co-stars receive about $20 million annually in residuals from the 1990s hit. Kudrow, 62, played Phoebe Buffay from 1994 to 2004 alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, and the late Matthew Perry.
The Friends actors negotiated collectively, raising per-episode pay from $22,500 in season one to $1 million in the final two seasons. They reunited for a 2021 HBO Max special, earning $2.5 million each. Kudrow recently states, ‘There was a genius at work. And whatever any of us do in the future, we will never experience something like that again.’
