Expert: Mike Caldwell - 7/23/2009

Question
My family and i were just watching the DVD's and finished the episode "Goodbye Alice, Hello". I did not remember the controversial scene from my own childhood so i looked it up and found this site on google. so about the much talked about naked swimming invite from the new neighbor, i'm now wondering if perhaps this was put in to show how much Alice looked out for these kids. Who did this even in the 70's!? i'm not sure how normal it was but today to ask kids to swim naked would be a prompt to call the police. Were they implying that this family could have been pedophiles or was it just the swinging times? i was a child when this episode aired and i never experienced any such invite or heard of one. Was this also one of the other reasons Robert Reed didnt appear? I do admit though that Florence Henderson carried herself quite powerfully despite his abscence! Thank you for the time if you know anything about this part of the storyline. Ive read alot of the other comments pertaining to it that it was so shocking that it was considered an urban legend before the dvd's.

Answer
These days, that quasi-deleted scene about the skinny-dipping brings about many thoughts of what they might have been thinking at the time.  Milt Rosen, the writer of this episode's script, was an old school writer that did episodes for many other shows from the 60s to the 80s, such as "My Three Sons", "Hello, Larry", "The Dinah Shore Show", even things like "The A-Team".  Sherwood Schwartz was such an insanely safe producer, he wouldn't have touched anything that could have been perceived as pedo at the time.  That scene was more of a commentary on the nudist "craze" of the time, and they routinely took slams at the counterculture in general.  Remember weird Myrna the actress and the strange director for the episode "And now, a word from our sponsor"?  They were parodying people not being normal, and such was the case for the alleged nudists down the street.  The show was just making a comment about the weird "free thinking" people in California at the time.  The nudism thing, the hippies, etc.  They usually didn't intrude into the Brady's safe aquarium world, but sometimes they had to acknowledge that there were a lot of odd lifestyles happening in southern California back then.
There's no supporting evidence that the skinny-dipping scene was the reason that Reed didn't appear.  Most have chalked it up to his ongoing dissension with Sherwood, and this episode was one in which they just didn't want to deal with Reed's rants.  There never was a specific reason, other than arguments with the executives, for why Reed was written out.