Cousin Oliver Didn’t Intend to Make ‘The Brady Bunch’ Jump the Shark: ‘I Was 9’

It’s been 50 years since The Brady Bunch left the airwaves, so why does Robby Rist still have to put up with this crap? 

Half a century after the kid actor was brought in to juice ratings for the flagging sitcom, Susan Olsen, who played Cindy Brady, is still calling his character, cousin Oliver, “our shark jump.” To make matters worse, Christopher “Peter” Knight called out Barry “Greg” Williams for hating on the tyke. “Barry was not a fan of Robbie Rist,” Knight explained. “When Robbie came on the show to play cousin Oliver, Barry wasn’t… Maybe because he was older and more conscious of what that could mean, he didn’t like him.”

Rist defended himself this week on The Patrick LabyorSheaux podcast. “I really got a sense from them over the years that they felt like I was some kind of interloper,” Rist said. “That I — you know, as a 9-year-old — had designs on sort of getting my claws into this thing that they’ve been working on for five years.”

But the Brady actors were giving him too much credit, Rist said. There were two reasons they had nothing to worry about: “I’m not that smart, and I was 9.”

“People would come up to me and say, ‘You’re the guy who killed The Brady Bunch,’” Rist told Cracked in 2023. “It cemented itself in the early days of the internet. On jumptheshark.com, there was a page called ‘New Kid in Town,’ and my picture was at the top the entire time it was up.”

On the website whowouldyoukill.com, Cousin Oliver was nominated more than any other celebrity. “It was things like, ‘I’d throw Oliver into a volcano,’ and ‘I’d drag him around my block with his neck tied to the back of my pickup truck.’ There was so much that a friend of mine made me a little booklet of them,” Rist said.

The legacy of Cousin Oliver has been a lot for Rist to carry around for the past few decades, especially considering he only worked on the show for six weeks, he told Labyorteaux. “I used to describe it as: Have you ever had a summer job, you know, working at a fast-food place for the summer? And then after six weeks, you go back to school or whatever, and for the rest of your life, people walk up to you and go, ‘You worked at Burger World, didn’t you?’”

It’s worse if that summer gig at Burger World is the only thing people ever . “I don’t want something that happened when I was nine to be the biggest thing I ever did, right?” But the guy has also been the voice of Michelangelo in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, so at least he avoided being a one-hit wonder. 

Less well-adjusted adults would resent all the hate, but Rist found a way to embrace it. “Here we are 50 years later, still talking about it,” he told Cracked. “That’s why, when someone says to me, ‘You killed The Brady Bunch,’ I say, ‘Yeah, I did — I was a nine-year-old Bond villain. Bring it.’”