Married... with Children


Married... with Children is an American television sitcom created by Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt for the Fox Broadcasting Company, broadcast from April 5, 1987, to June 9, 1997. It is the longest-running live-action sitcom ever aired on Fox. Married... with Children was the first primetime series broadcast on the new Fox network. The series' run ended with the episode broadcast on May 5, 1997. Two previously unaired episodes were broadcast on June 9, 1997, and June 18, 2002.
The show is set in Chicago and follows the lives of Al Bundy, a former high school football player turned hard-luck women's shoe salesman; his lazy wife Peggy; their daughter Kelly; and their son Bud. The show also features their neighbors Steve and Marcy Rhoades, both of whom Al finds annoying, and who feel the same way about him. Later in the series, Marcy marries Jefferson D'Arcy, a white-collar criminal and former CIA agent who becomes her "trophy husband" and Al's best friend.
The series is one of the longest-running sitcoms in American television history, covering 11 seasons with 259 episodes in its run. Its theme song is "Love and Marriage" by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Frank Sinatra. Critical reception was mixed during its original run, and the show's sexually charged humor and depiction of a dysfunctional family were in stark contrast to family sitcoms of the era.
The first two seasons were videotaped in front of a studio audience at ABC Television Center in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, with seasons 3 through 8 recorded at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, and seasons 9 through 11 at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. The series was a production of Columbia Pictures Television for FOX, through Embassy Communications for Season 1 and ELP Communications for Seasons 2-11.
In 2008, the show made the top 100 on Entertainment Weekly "New TV Classics" list, placing number 94. In May 2022, an animated revival was in the works.

Cast and characters

ActorRoleYearsSeasonsAppearances
Ed O'NeillAl Bundy1987–19971–11259
Katey SagalMargaret "Peggy" Bundy1987–19971–11247
Christina ApplegateKelly Bundy1987–19971–11256
David FaustinoBud Bundy1987–19971–11257
Amanda BearseMarcy Rhoades/D'Arcy1987–19971–11236
David GarrisonSteve Rhoades1987–1990, 1992–93, 19951–4, guest 6–7, 973
Ted McGinleyJefferson D'Arcy1989, 1991–97Guest 4, main 5–11166

  • Al Bundy – A misanthrope, afflicted by the so-called "Bundy curse" that consigns him to an unrewarding career selling women's shoes and a life with a family that mocks and disrespects him, who still enjoys the simple things in life. He constantly attempts to relive his high-school football days, when he was an "All State Fullback". His most noted achievement was having scored four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High. His favorite things in life are the local nudie bar, his collection of BigUns magazine, his 1972 Dodge Dart with more than on the odometer, and a television show called Psycho Dad. Despite his family's antipathy for him, and his for them, Al is always ready to defend his family and the Bundy honor.
  • Peggy Bundy – Al's wife who is always pestering him about money and refuses to do any housework or get a job. Peggy is a lazy redhead who spends most of her time watching talk shows such as Oprah or stealing Al's limited funds to go shopping; she frequently mocks Al about his unglamorous job, his meager earnings, his hygiene, and his poor sexual abilities. Her careless spending on things like clothes and male strip clubs has run Al into debt on numerous occasions. A recurring joke in the series is Al's and Peggy's regrets of having married each other, although on occasion they will show affection towards one another. Peggy's best friend is Marcy, with whom Peggy occasionally heads into trouble. Peggy's side of the family is a backwoods clan of hillbillies whom she often forces the other Bundys to endure, especially her morbidly obese mother, whom Al finds intolerable.
  • Kelly Bundy – the Bundys' firstborn; a dumb blonde who is often derided as promiscuous and dates guys who irritate Al to the point that he wants to physically assault them. Her stupidity manifests in many ways, from forgetting ideas on the spot to mispronouncing or misspelling simple words. She and her brother Bud generally get along, but enjoy belittling one another.
  • Budrick "Bud" Franklin Bundy – the younger Bundy offspring, and sometimes the more level-headed family member, although his preoccupation with sex sometimes leads to inevitable failures with women. He and older sister Kelly constantly taunt each other, but when Kelly is in a legitimate bind he will support her, much like Kelly does for him under similar circumstances.
  • Marcy Rhoades, later Marcy D'Arcy – the Bundys' next-door neighbor, Al's nemesis and Peggy's best friend; an educated banker, but also a feminist and environmentalist who often protests Al's schemes with his NO MA'AM group. Marcy is the founder and leader of an anti-man support group called "FANG". Marcy and Al constantly bicker and do not get along. For the first few seasons of the show, Marcy is married to Steve Rhoades. After Marcy and Steve divorce and he leaves during the fourth season, Marcy meets and marries Jefferson D'Arcy, giving her the name Marcy D'Arcy.
  • Steven "Steve" Bartholomew Rhoades is Marcy's first husband, a stuffy banker who finds himself frequently entangled in Al's schemes. Steve's most prized possession is his Mercedes-Benz, which he does not even let Marcy drive. Although very much in love at the beginning of the series, Steve and Marcy grow apart and he leaves her during the fourth season to become a forest ranger at Yosemite National Park. He later comes back in "The Egg and I" episode to try and reclaim his old life with Marcy, but finds trouble with Jefferson, Marcy's second husband. Steve later has another job as the dean of Bud's college, after blackmailing the previous one he worked under as a chauffeur.
  • Jefferson Milhouse D'Arcy, a pretty-boy scammer to whom Marcy wakes up one morning and discovers she has married. Unlike Steve, Jefferson is more of a free spirit, likes to have fun, is constantly unemployed, has no money of his own, and uses Marcy for financial purposes. Marcy is aware of this, but whenever Jefferson gets into trouble with her, he distracts her by working his charm and resorting to sexual bartering. In several episodes, Jefferson is implied, but never confirmed, to have had a past life as a former spy/CIA operative.

    Pilot episode

In the show's pilot episode, actors Tina Caspary and Hunter Carson played the roles of Kelly and Bud Bundy, respectively. Before the series aired publicly, the roles for the two Bundy children were re-cast. Ed O'Neill and the show's producers worried about a lack of chemistry with the parents and the original actors cast as the children. A re-casting was done and all of the scenes in the pilot with Carson and Caspary were re-shot with David Faustino and Christina Applegate playing Bud and Kelly Bundy.

Recurring characters

Development

The working title of Married... with Children was Not the Cosbys, as a mockery of family sitcoms that were common on primetime television in the mid-1980s such as The Cosby Show. Creators Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye were told by Garth Ancier and other Fox executives "to be as outrageous as they could be, doing the sort of material the Big Three would never allow on the air", wrote Daniel M. Kimmel in 2004. However, Fox CEO Barry Diller had initial doubts that Married... with Children would be successful.

Reception

Critical response

For season 1, Metacritic calculated an average of 58 out of 100 based on 5 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Reviews of the debut episode were mixed. In 1987, Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times praised the casting of the Bundys, found the character development of the Rhodes lacking, and warned viewers: "The satire is heavy-handed." Conversely, also in 1987, Tom Shales of The Washington Post called the debut episode "nasty-minded, overacted and poorly cast". For The New York Times, John J. O'Connor described it as "loud, coarse and life-of-the-party vulgar". O'Connor also compared Married... unfavorably to other family shows like The Life of Riley and All in the Family, describing the show as "pure blue-collar shtick, dressed up with the usual sexual-potency and bathroom jokes".

Ratings

Despite the show's enduring popularity and fanbase, Married... with Children was never a major ratings success. Part of the reason was that Fox, a startup network, did not have the affiliate base of the Big Three television networks, thus preventing the series from reaching the entire country. In an interview for a special commemorating the series' 20-year anniversary in 2007, Katey Sagal stated that part of the problem the series faced was that many areas of the country were able to get Fox only through low-quality UHF channels well into the early 1990s, while some areas of the country did not receive the new network at all, a problem not largely rectified until the launch of Foxnet in June 1991 and later the network's acquisition of National Football League rights which led to several stations across the United States changing affiliations. For instance, Ed O'Neill's hometown of Youngstown, Ohio did not have its own Fox affiliate until CBS affiliate WKBN-TV signed on WFXI-CA/WYFX-LP in 1998, one year after the show went off the air, so many of O'Neill's friends and family mistakenly thought he was famous for beer commercials during this time.
Another problem lay in the fact that many of the newly developed series on Fox were unsuccessful, which kept the network from building a popular lineup to draw in a larger audience. In its original airing debut, Married... with Children was part of a Sunday lineup that competed with the popular Murder, She Wrote and Sunday-night movie on CBS. Fellow freshman series included Duet, cancelled in 1989, along with It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Tracey Ullman Show, both of which were canceled in 1990. The success of The Simpsons, which debuted on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, helped draw some viewers over to Fox, allowing Married... with Children to rank in the Nielsen Top 50 from Season 4 through Season 8, peaking at No. 37 in Season 6. Although these ratings were somewhat small in comparison with the other three networks, they were nonetheless more than good enough for Fox to keep renewing the show. In its prime in the early 1990s, the show was averaging more than 20 million viewers every week.
While the series did not end on a cliffhanger, it was expected to be renewed for a 12th season and thus did not have a proper series finale when Fox decided to cancel it in 1997. With Fox announcing the cancellation publicly before informing the cast and crew, most if not all of them found out about the series cancellation from fans and low-level employees instead of from network executives. Katey Sagal stated that she constantly felt that the series was neglected by Fox despite helping bring the fledgling network on the map ; for his part, Ed O'Neill attributed possible neglect of the series by Fox to constant turnover of some of the top positions at the network. In a 2013 interview, O'Neill stated that he felt TV stations who owned syndication rights to the series put pressure on Fox and Sony Pictures Television to end the series since the show had nearly three times the episodes needed for syndication and the production of more episodes would have resulted in higher rights fees.
SeasonEpisodesTimeslot PremiereFinaleTV seasonRankRating
113Sunday 8:00 PM1986–87#142–
222Sunday 8:00 PM
Sunday 8:30 PM 		1987–88#1154.7
322Sunday 8:30 PM1988–89#6310.5
423Sunday 9:00 PM1989–90#4112.9
525Sunday 9:00 PM1990–91#4112.4
626Sunday 9:00 PM1991–92#3712.5
726Sunday 9:00 PM1992–93#4311.4
826Sunday 9:00 PM1993–94#4610.8
926Sunday 9:00 PM1994–95#669.5
1026Sunday 9:00 PM1995–96#788.2
1124Saturday 9:00 PM
Sunday 7:30 PM
Monday 9:30 PM
Monday 9:00 PM 		1996–97#976.7