Sherwood Schwartz Reveals The Brady Bunch Tiger Was Replaced

Sherwood Schwartz wrote that the brady bunch dog Tiger was hit by a car and killed after running off the set during filming of the 5th episode, leaving the series to continue with a different dog in the same family role. The detail sits inside his memoir, and it explains why the pet that helped define the early show gradually disappeared from the screen.

Schwartz's Katchoo account

Schwartz described the moment in Brady, Brady, Brady: The Complete Story of the Brady Bunch, writing, "The dog was placed in the boys' bedroom set, and I retrieved Mike Lookinland from the schoolroom. Bobby Brady was ready. The dog was ready (so I thought) and the camera rolled. The director said, 'Action!' And the dog promptly ran off the set." After that, Tiger's on-set trainer told him, "That's not Tiger. Tiger was home, and he got out. He was hit by a car and killed."

That replacement mattered because Tiger was part of the Brady family setup from the start. In the pilot, The Honeymoon, which aired in September 1969, Tiger shared the screen with Fluffy, the cat that originally belonged to Carol Martin's daughters Marcia, Jan, and Cindy, as the blended household came together. The dog was also the star of that first episode before the show settled into its five-season run.

Episode 11 of Season 2

Tiger's last appearance came in Episode 11 of Season 2, titled What Goes Up.... After the accident, the dog was temporarily replaced with another performance dog, and Schwartz later wrote that the crew did not know the switch had happened. That created a visible gap between the early show viewers remember and the version that followed.

Eve Plumb said in a 2024 Today show interview that the family's connection with Tiger "just sort of faded away." Christopher Knight added, "Watching the early shows with Tiger, Tiger's an important element..." Barry Williams put the show's inconsistency more bluntly: "Continuity was not one of the strong points of our show," Such comments line up with the way the dog's role softened over time rather than disappearing in one clean edit.

For viewers revisiting The Brady Bunch now, the practical takeaway is simple: the dog on screen after the accident was not the original Tiger. Schwartz's account turns a familiar TV pet into a case study in how a production quietly adapts after an off-screen loss, and it leaves the early episodes with a very different weight than the reruns suggested.