Season 5, Episode 22: 8 March 1974 The Hair-Brained Scheme, like most of the fifth season, gets a bit of a ribbing most of the time but it's largely undeserved. In a bid to get rich quick, Bobby buys 24 bottles of Neat & Natural Hair Tonic at $1 each which he intends to peddle door-to-door at $2 a pop. But after his first round of unsuccessful door-knocking he's ready to pack it all in, until Greg does the dutiful big brother thing and buys a bottle for himself. The tonic turns Greg's hair the kind of violently flourescent orange that nobody's hair should ever be. And it's only 24 hours until his high school graduation ceremony! Ever-trusty Carol saves the day by insisting Greg swallows his pride and comes with her to the beauty parlor to get it fixed. Greg graduates with both his dark brown locks and his dignity restored, but Carol's sad that Mike's out of town and consequently misses the whole thing... coz after five years of banging on about the importance of family values, sticking together and supporting each other, of course Mike was always going to miss his first-born's high school graduation, wasn't he? Peter and Marcia debate who'll get Greg's attic bedroom once he goes to college, mimicking the same tensions between Greg and Marcia in the previous season's finale. Cousin Oliver has the solution: turn the attic into a guest room and let him move in. Cue hysterical canned laughter, the closing credits over that famous blue grid... and then that was that. Within months it was announced that the show wouldn't return for a sixth season and The Brady Bunch was no more. To that end, 'The Hair-Brained Scheme' is significant on several levels. Robert Reed felt the episode was absurdly slapstick and his fervent objections lead to long-simmering tensions between he and producer Sherwood Schwartz finally boil over. Schwartz responded by writing Mike out of the episode, a move as significant as it was poignant since neither man knew it was to be the last episode ever made. Also significant, though on a somewhat more innocuous level, was that the episode almost portrayed rage-fuelled violence between Brady kids for the first time, it was the first High School Graduation of a Brady kid, and the word 'sex' was used for the first time in the entire series. For all of these reasons 'The Hair-Brained Scheme' is significant to the overall story of The Brady Bunch and deserving of its berth within this Top 10.
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