How Christopher Knight accidentally changed family dinners forever

Christopher Knight, who played Peter Brady on The Brady Bunch, inadvertently made a pop culture moment that will last forever with a humble dinner request: "pork chops and apple sauce." On the Monday, March 31, episode of The Real Brady Bros podcast, Knight, 67, and co-star Barry Williams looked back at the show's classic line from the season 3 episode "The Personality Kid."
The episode, which was first broadcast in 1971, sees Peter struggling with a crisis of confidence after he is informed that he has "no personality" at the party of a friend. Eager to make himself over, he sits through an episode of Humphrey Bogart on TV and decides to emulate the great actor's mannerisms and voice. He then experiments with his new identity on his mother, Carol (Florence Henderson), and the family's housekeeper, Alice (Ann B. Davis), who are cooking dinner. In his imitation of Bogart, Peter reads the now-famous line: "Pork chops and apple sauce, ain't that swell."
Knight remembered how the scene became life on its own and became one of the most-quoted lines from The Brady Bunch. “The putting on airs and faces … not necessary, and can be humiliating,” Knight said of Peter’s lesson in the episode. “And in this case, [it] led to me being the only person on the planet having a pork chop phenomenon in life where I’m the only person who is asked to say ‘pork chops and apple sauce.’”
The surprise effect of the line made a plain dinner pairing into a cultural touchstone, with fans still quoting it decades on. The scene is still one of The Brady Bunch's most iconic and favorite comedic moments, demonstrating that sometimes, even the smallest of lines can leave the biggest of marks.