Married… with Children was the first primetime series ever broadcast on Fox, running from April 5, 1987 to June 9, 1997, and it is still the longest-running live-action sitcom the network has aired. It exists to be the opposite of every family comedy that came before it, and for eleven seasons it never once blinked.
The Bundys
Al Bundy, played by Ed O’Neill, is a former high school football player turned women’s shoe salesman in Chicago, and he hates his job, his wife, his children and, most days, his life. Katey Sagal plays Peggy, his lazy wife. Christina Applegate plays Kelly, the dim, promiscuous daughter, and David Faustino plays Bud, the son whose luck with women is a running joke that runs for a decade. Amanda Bearse plays the neighbor Marcy, whom Al finds as annoying as she finds him, first married to Steve and later to Jefferson, played by Ted McGinley.
The Joke
The joke is that nobody in the house likes anyone else and nobody leaves. O’Neill’s performance is the reason it works. Al is a loser who knows it and has decided to be loud about it, and O’Neill plays him with a weariness that is genuinely funny rather than merely mean. Sagal is his equal, and their marriage is a two-hander of mutual contempt that somehow reads as durable.
Why It Mattered
In 1987 the American family sitcom was warm by law. Married… with Children arrived on a brand-new network with nothing to lose and made the family a battlefield. It was crude, it was cheap, and it was watched, and it proved that Fox could exist. Every mean-spirited comedy that followed owes it a debt.
Where It Falls Short
Eleven seasons of the same insult is a long time. The show never developed its characters because developing them would have broken the joke, and by the later years the writing is a machine that produces the expected line on cue. The treatment of Kelly, whose entire character is that she is stupid and available, is the kind of thing the show’s defenders wave away and its critics do not, and the critics have a point. The last season ended with a whimper: the final episode aired May 5, 1997, and two unaired ones trickled out afterward, one in June 1997 and one in 2002.
The Verdict
Married… with Children is a crude, historically important sitcom with one great central performance and a joke it told for ten years. The performance is worth seeing. The joke wears out long before the show does.
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