“The Brady Bunch” continues to be one of the most beloved television shows of all time decades after it went off the air.

The hilariously upbeat show brought joy to millions of fans, which is why it has come as somewhat of a sad surprise that one of the show’s stars described Robert Reed, who played family patriarch Mike Brady, as a “very sad man.”

Before her death in 2014, Ann B. Davis, who played Alice on the show, opened up to the Archive of American Television about Reed’s many problems with the show as well as the underlying sadness that she saw in him.

Reed considered himself a serious actor, and he acted mostly in dramas before he took the role of Mike Brady, which came to be a move he quickly regretted.

“From the very beginning of filming, Bob Reed was reticent about the series,” the show’s creator Sherwood Schwartz wrote in the 2010 book “Brady, Brady, Brady: The Complete Story of the Brady Bunch.” “He objected to just about everything.”

Davis said in her interview that she always saw Reed as a “very sad man”during their years of working together.

“Robert was a very sad man,” she said. “I knew that he was a good actor. He’d been classically trained. He’d done classical things. And he was not happy. Of the shows that Paramount was making, the pilots that they were making, ‘The Brady Bunch’ was the last one he wanted to do.”

“He was a very good actor and he did it very well,” Davis added. “But he was never really happy with it and that rubbed off on the set.”

Despite his issues with the show, Reed helped to create a beloved program that fans still love watching to this day.

Kimberly Potts, author of “The Way We All Became the Brady Bunch: How the Canceled Sitcom Became the Beloved Pop Culture Icon We Are Still Talking About Today,” opened up to The New York Post in 2019 about Reed’s contradicting feelings of disdain for the show verses his devotion to the children acting in it.

“He took his responsibility as the TV dad seriously,” Potts said. “He famously took the kids on a trip to England because he wanted to expose them to culture and Shakespeare. He also famously gave them Super 8 cameras for Christmas. He wanted to help them the same as a father would.”

Susan Olsen, who played the youngest Brady daughter “Cindy” on the show, had nothing but fond memories of Reed.

“Bob remains to this day my shining example of how an adult should be with kids,” she told ABC News. “There was this unconditional, fatherly love that he had for us that we were always aware of.”