Eve Plumb says 'Brady Bunch' cast earned little from endless reruns

Eve Plumb says the cast of "The Brady Bunch" earned little from the show's long run in reruns.

Plumb, who played Jan Brady, said the actors received residuals for only the first 10 airings of each episode. The payments ended well before the series became a staple of syndicated television.

"A lot of times when you're an actor, you can see that people are looking at you like you have it all, and you have all the money in the world," Plumb told Fox News Digital. "I just wanted to set it straight that that's not necessarily true. That the pay rate was different, the residuals were different and also actors are continually having to fight to be paid, in any way."

She added that some people assume actors should work for free because the job is enjoyable. "It's work," she said. "We're trained, and we spend a lot of time and money to do the work well. So, we should be paid."

In her memoir, "Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond," Plumb wrote that many viewers assume the six child actors still collect steady income from the hundreds of thousands of reruns since 1974. "If only it were so," she said.

"The reality is that we each had a contract that would pay us residuals for the first 10 reruns of each episode only," she wrote. "Obviously, it was never expected that the show would rerun more than three, maybe four, times. Needless to say, that faucet of residuals income ran dry before I even graduated from high school."

Plumb said the checks stopped soon after production ended. "If I had a dime for every rerun episode, I'd pay off the national deficit," she wrote. "I don't."

Former co-star Barry Williams made similar points in his 1992 memoir, "Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg." He said the highest-paid child actor on the show earned $1,100 a week in the final season. That came to just over $24,000 for the 22-episode year before taxes and fees.

"Salaries for sitcom actors have changed considerably since the '70s," Williams wrote. "It was enough to indulge in toys, but hardly enough to carry you through the slow periods that inevitably followed."

He added that payments for later airings ended shortly after filming wrapped. The book "Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond" is available now.