Friday Face Off: "April Madness/Spring Cleaning" Edition: The Championship

Look, it's enough already with this bit, right? You’ve been waiting for this moment for weeks. We've examined these people so thoroughly that we wouldn't be surprised if we got an engraved invitation to appear on the next 1980's themed, "I-Love-Nostalgia" type rehash retrospective show on VH1, and it all comes down to this.



We’re not going to bore you with recaps (although if you really need one you can look over Here) we've narrowed it down to Mr. Lynn Belvedere versus Alice Nelson to determine the champion of the "April Madness (Spring Cleaning)" tournament edition of Friday Face Off!


Now that we’re down to the final match up it’s time to introduce the criteria by which the champion of this obsurd contest will be decided; Experience, Ability, Relationships and Impact.

Experience is the work experience in their past. What their daily responsibilities entails falls under Ability. Relationships and Impact are self explanitory.

First up is Experience. Let’s be real, both of these candidates are exceptional. If they were real people we would be happy to have either of them to run a swiffer through Fish&Spaghetti Mansion. They’re seasoned pro's who blow most competition out of the water. But stacked up against each other you’ve got to go with Mr. Belvedere.

Given that Mr. Belvedere’s a world traveler and Alice Nelson has spent her career in the same house, there’s really no debate. Mr. Belvedere’s experiences are more varied and he’s encountered different situations with different families. Alice Nelson is great but she's one dimensional in this regard.

When it comes to Ability, again, these two are pretty evenly matched up. In theory. In reality Alice had to deal with two parents and twice as many kids as Mr. Belvedere did. Alice had to set the table for eight, do laundry for eight (Do the math on what the laundry of an 8 person home looks like after a week real quick, including underwear) she also had to chase people around every now and then too.

She had to prepare a meal that eight different sets of taste buds would enjoy or at least find non-offensive.

Mr. Belvedere’s a qualified guy, but he’s literally lapped by what Alice Nelson has to do on a weekly basis.

In terms of Relationships things are actually equally matched. Mr. Belvedere’s relationships with his charges grew to the point where they relied on him more so than their rarely present and almost negligent parents.

But Alice Nelson was a backbone for the Brady men when Mr. Brady’s first wife died (allegedly, we personally speculate that Mr. Brady killed her but that's a whole other post. It may even be a whole other blog altogether).

She was someone they relied on and even helped the transition of the second marriage.

So while Mr. Belvedere’s relationship with the kids may have grown stronger over the years, Alice Nelson was there for the Brady boys at arguably the two most trying times in their young lives; the death of their mother and the integration of their stepmother and stepsisters.

And that is what we call a push.

In the final category (and the de facto tiebreaker), it’s the measuring of their Impact on the house. Alice Nelson was the literal and metaphorical center of the Brady Bunch.

She was their backbone. But she never left. We can’t really measure a before and after. We know that the household is better, but we’ve never seen it without her. On the other hand Mr. Belvedere came to a family in need and in the last episode he left them because his job was done. He was a stabilizing element and saw the kids through their troubling teen years. He shaped them and held the family together. Thus he had more Impact.

So there you have it folks. After 4 weeks, 9 candidates, literally minutes and minutes of research, debates and staff in fighting including 3 fist fights, 2 indian burns, 3 resignations and a missing Labradoodle, as well as 2 trips to royal farms (which in itself resulted in 1 bout with dysentery and 1 trip to the emergency room), Mr. Belvedere has been definitively crowned as televisions greatest housekeeper.

We know some of you may not agree, but trust and believe us when we tell you that out of everyone on the list, Mr. B is the one that has the best skill set to keep your house in order. You can go ahead and hire lazy, smart ass Florence if you want.


And thats that.

Next week, we return to our regularly scheduled "Friday Face Off" featuring two other things.