The Brady Bunch may have been “the whitest show on television,” but series alum Barry Williams is shedding light on the work behind the scenes to create a more diverse cast.

On the Jan. 28 episode of his and his co-star Christopher Knight’s rewatch podcast, The Real Brady Bros, the on-screen brothers discussed the series’ Season 5 episode, “Miss Popularity.” In the midst of their conversation, Williams brought up Black actress Jere Fields (who was credited as Jerelyn Fields at the time), who portrayed Jan’s (Eve Plumb) classmate Shirley.

“I thought this was nice because this is a young lady of color, and this didn’t happen a lot,” he explained.

Williams acknowledged the “influence” from the show’s producer Lloyd Schwartz and series creator Sherwood Schwartz in “making sure that everyone was represented.”

“I know that we’re the whitest show on television, but I do think that there were very deliberate attempts to try and integrate the show,” he said. “There were a couple of episodes that specifically dealt with that, and we see this a lot, especially when there are crowds, and then maybe there are two or three friends, we’ll see different ethnicities and etcetera. So, this is one of those cases, and she’s adorable, and it was fun to see.”

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter in a November 2024 interview, Williams shared that he and Knight have ” learned quite a bit about who” Sherwood Schwartz was through their podcast, which they launched in February 2022, as well as Sherwood’s “intentions and then how it was reflected in [their] show.”

Knight added, “And in his other series [like Gilligan’s Island]. He was about one thing and that was about disparate people getting along.”

As noted by Entertainment Weekly and People, “Kelly’s Kids,” the episode that directly followed “Miss Popularity” on Jan. 4, 1974, incorporated such diversity through the introduction of the Kelly family, who move into the neighborhood and adopt three children of different ethnicities, played by Todd Lookinland, Carey Wong and Billy ‘Pop’ Atmore, per IMDb credits. Both outlets report that the episode was supposed to inspire a spin-off surrounding the Kelly’s, though the project never came to fruition.

The Brady Bunch is now streaming on Paramount+.