Robbie Rist, The Brady Bunch's Cousin Oliver, Denies Being the Show's 'Shark Jump'

Published: May 21, 2025

Robbie Rist, the actor who played Brady cousin Oliver on The Brady Bunch, is responding to the notion that his character was the show's death knell. Earlier, some of the original cast members of the show said Rist's Oliver was "our shark jump," indicating that his intro on the show signaled its end.

Rist himself says he was simply "a 9-year-old," and not "an interloper." The actor made the remarks on a new podcast, just days after other cast members spoke about his role on the show's final season.

During a panel at The Chocolate Expo at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., earlier in May, Brady siblings Barry Williams, Susan Olsen, and Christopher Knight reflected on welcoming another kid into the household in season 5. Oliver, Olsen said, was "our shark jump."

"Every time a show is starting to get a little bit lower in the ratings, they start to add in the cute kid," Olsen explained.

Agreeing, Knight, 67, added, "We were getting a little old for the premise of the show."

"I was looking for the exit when we saw Oliver walking through the front door," Williams, 70, admitted.

"Me too," Olsen agreed. Acknowledging the addition was to keep the show running beyond its initial five-year contract, she continued, "And I loved him. I love Robbie Rist, but I didn't want to go through puberty on TV."

Williams added a defense of Rist himself, saying, "he is not Cousin Oliver. He's a cool guy."

"We all like him. We had him in our TV movie with Lifetime, our Christmas movie [Blending Families] and insisted he be in it," he continued. "We have a lot of fun and we all get along. He's also been a guest on my podcast."

"But Oliver was not a Brady," he concluded.

Speaking on the May 20 episode of The Patrick LabyorSheaux podcast, Rist responded to those claims, saying, "I really got a sense from them over the years that they felt like I was some kind of interloper. 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."

"Of course, they gave me way too much credit because I'm not that smart and I was 9," Rist added.

Rist added that "apparently overnight, the network told the producers, 'We should add a kid,' " adding that he had heard that the original cast members had no idea what was coming.

"So I go in and I do my six weeks on it, and then it's gone. And then it gets cancelled anyway," he said.

Rist added that the cast members were "super cool," saying, "they all knew each other and everyone was super friendly with each other."

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