Here in Australia circa 1979-1982 all us kids at school loved The Brady Bunch, watching it every day after school. We knew it was goofy, cheesy and very "American" but we loved it. We found it odd that such a highly popular show ever ended. The story that went around school was that they only ended the show because the actor who played Cindy died in real-life. (This myth was actually due to confusion with Anissa Jones, who played a similar character in the less-known sitcom Family Affair.)

The Brady Bunch was actually in a roster of several US sitcoms that would be stripped in afterschool slots here: Bewitched, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island, and (the least popular with kids) Here's Lucy.

I loved reading TV books and around that time was astonished to learn that many of these shows were even older than Brady (which from its garish fashions did look a little old). Others were made in the 1965-1970 period. I was surprised at such old shows being in constant rotation and still quite popular. Then I was even more surprised to learn that The Brady Bunch was not actually all that popular in its day, its popularity took off later. Same with Jeannie. Turns out it wasn't a weird unexpected thing that happened on Australian TV - that was the studio's production model. They would make a loss on a sitcom in prime time until it reached 100 episodes, hoping they'd later make the money back in multiple repeated runs stripped after school.