So, I’ve continued to dip from time to time into Vega$, that late-70s TV show starring Robert Urich as a T-Bird-driving private eye which I briefly discussed last summer. I haven’t made it through the first season yet, and honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to bother completing it. The show is entertaining in the bubbly, has-been-celebrity-watch fashion of many series from this era (Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, etc.), but it’s ultimately pretty disposable. No, actually it’s downright confounding, because you can see how this show could’ve been so much more. All the pieces were in place for it to be a groundbreaking peek at the grime beneath the glitz of one of America’s greatest fantasy cities, with a compassionate hero who struggles with his own dark side even as he fights to ensure justice for the victims he encounters. In other words, it could’ve been very much like Miami Vice would turn out to be only a few years later. (Remember that Vega$ was created by Michael Mann, the producer of Vice; Mann didn’t create Vice, but he was responsible for the show’s look and tone, and I’m not surprised that his earlier work contains seeds that flowered on the later show). But Vega$ is what it is, sadly, and even if it were to be remade today in a grittier style, I think the horse has already bolted on the thematic territory I’m talking about. It’s been done, and fans of the original Vega$ would no doubt gripe about how everything has to be “dark” these days, just I’ve done myself with remakes of old shows I like. C’est la vie.
Anyhow, one of the more amusing aspects of the show is the frequent guest appearances by old-timey entertainers and Hollywood B-listers trying to keep their careers going just a little longer. And the episode I watched the other night, “The Pageant,” contained not just one, but two of these guest appearances by well-known faces that added up to a real doozy of a laugh. The plot was unusually serious for Vega$, involving a serial rapist preying on contestants in the “Miss Casino” beauty pageant. The first young lady to get attacked is the daughter of a state senator who hires our hero, Dan Tanna, to find and stop the perpetrator without the publicity attracted by regular police activity. The senator was ably played by none other than Robert Reed, better known as Mike Brady on the classic sitcom The Brady Bunch, seen here at the height of his mid-70s perm-and-mustache phase. And the senator’s daughter? None other than… Maureen McCormick, a.k.a. Marsha Brady.
This casting was so startling and funny to me that I can’t help but think it had to be intended as some kind of stunt. I can actually hear the voiceover in my head saying, “Tonight on Vega$: a Brady Bunch father-and-daughter reunion in the City of Sin!” I compared the dates of production and it turns out that only four years had elapsed since the end of The Brady Bunch in March 1974 and the airing of “The Pageant” in November 1978, so audiences of the day would surely have noticed the pairing of two such familiar faces. I wonder if anyone back in ’78 found it unsettling to hear Mr. Brady discussing Marsha’s rape with a two-fisted PI? Did the producers of Vega$ have some kind of perverse goal in casting actors so strongly associated with a squeaky-clean family comedy? Maybe they were trying to make the rape seem extra-tragic by having it happen to one of America’s favorite TV daughters? Or is it actually possible that McCormick and Reed were cast independently, without anyone even considering the Brady Bunch angle? It’s possible I suppose… but it still feels like a stunt to me.
