'Married... With Children' Star Opens Up About Show's 'Shocking' Cancellation

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/736fa24...d...-with.html

For “Married... With Children” star David Faustino, playing wisecracking son Bud Bundy on the provocative series was something of a dream. Though Faustino wasn’t quite as outgoing as his character, he and the other stars often seemed as close as a real family, and, as Faustino tells “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”, it was the camaraderie and talent on set that made “Married... With Children” a work experience they always wanted to continue. “It was such a well-oiled machine and so easy and so much fun and we got along so well that I don’t think that any one of us were ready for it to end,” Faustino says. “We were like, ‘Let’s just ride this thing until the wheels fall off.’” However, the network

[Mr. Television]

Link doesn't even go to the article.

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Ed O'Neill told the Television Academy that he believes that MWC was cancelled after 11 seasons in 1997 because smaller affiliates who purchased the show for syndication didn't want Sony (Columbia Pictures Television) nor Fox to produce anymore episodes because of how expensive they were. They were apparently, worth $1 million or so an episode. And MWC had already produced over 250 episodes.

With that being said, I can kind of get why Fox decided to pull the plug on MWC even though it never got a proper series finale. You for one thing, had an already aging show with highly paid star (Ed O'Neill) three co-stars who would be expected to be on every episode who were with the show its entire existence (Katey Sagel, Christina Applegate, and David Faustino), a co-star who had been there from the beginning in a significant number of episodes (Amanda Bearse), another co-star in Ted McGinley, and then a significant number of recurring characters who were Al's friends.

I'm not absolutely sure without immediately looking it up, but I've been told that The Simpsons and The X-Files got better ratings on Sundays as they were now Fox's biggest shows in the mid to late '90s. So I don't know if it would've made much sense to simply move MWC back to its old Sunday night spot.

And Fox had already had other, younger shows that were hits like Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, King of the Hill, Living Single and New York Undercover on Thursday nights, and Party of Five.

Fox could've in theory, moved MWC back to Saturdays, where it could've reasonably gotten better ratings than the other Saturday shows at the time like COPS and America's Most Wanted. But those two shows were cheap to produce unlike MWC.

Plus, Fox (or I suppose by extension now, Disney) never owned Married...with Children outright since it like I said, was a Sony property. Therefore, Fox wasn't going to get any worldwide syndicated money from the show if they produced extra episodes.

So basically, it all came down to Fox not really needing Married...with Children anymore and it becoming too expensive to produce.

[Cocoa8]

Exactly how did the show end?

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Originally Posted by Cocoa8

Exactly how did the show end?

There was no official series finale that was intended on giving the characters and storyline closure and tie-up any loose ends. "How to Marry a Moron", about Kelly's wedding is considered the de facto series finale. However, there was one last episode, "Chicago Shoe Exchange", which aired about a month later.