Married… With Children gave us an unhappy family like no other

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Dysfunctional TV families are now de rigueur, but there was a time when veteran writers Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt felt the market was saturated with saccharine portrayals. They’d both been around the sitcom block before taking their idea for what became Married… With Children to Fox—Moye had written for Diff’rent Strokes and Good Times, and his fellow Jeffersons writer Leavitt had previously worked on Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. Their combined experience with sitcom clans ran the gamut from idealized to aspirational yet relatable, but they were passionate about creating a show that turned up the realism. So the two pitched Fox on a sitcom premise that guaranteed group hugs would be few and far between.

Moye and Leavitt’s original concept for Married… With Children (née Not The Cosbys) was simple: The series would depart from the formulaic warmth and lessons of shows like Leave It To Beaver and Silver Spoons (the latter of which Moye co-developed) to create a singularly unhappy family for TV viewers. Instead of featuring an Eddie Haskell or a Kimmy Gibler, Married… With Children would center on a whole family of misfits, who we’d be lucky to see tolerate each other, let alone grow as the show progressed. Peg and Al Bundy would be the indifferent and downtrodden parents, respectively, of two teens who raised hell instead of any kind of awareness on issues affecting youth.

When the show was first pitched, Moye and Leavitt envisioned Sam Kinison as Al Bundy, the unsuccessful shoe salesman whose high school football glory is never far from his mind. The series creators had also hoped to snag Roseanne Barr for the role of Peggy, a stay-at-home mom who rarely left the couch. The producers reportedly modeled the characters after Kinison’s and Barr’s stand-up personas, which were popular but not exactly lovable. The two stand-ups passed on the show, with the latter debuting her own series about a less-than-perfect family just a year later on ABC. Kinison would later guest star in the season-four episode “It’s A Bundyful Life.”

Even without established comedians heading up the dysfunctional Bundy household, the fledgling Fox network picked up Married… With Children, adding it to a Sunday lineup that featured 21 Jump Street, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, and The Tracey Ullman Show. By then, Ed O’Neill and Katey Sagal had been cast as the miserable marrieds; they appeared in the pilot with Tina Caspary and Hunter Carson, who were initially cast as Kelly and Bud. But when the show debuted on April 5, 1987, Christina Applegate had replaced Caspary as elder sibling Kelly, while David Faustino donned the future baggy pants of Bud Bundy.

The Bundys were a whole family of malcontents, who sparred as much with each other as everyone else around them. They were a fun-house mirror version of a nuclear family. Al was a hollowed-out shell of Ward Cleaver—he had a family and a job, but derived little satisfaction or comfort from either. Most episodes centered on the Bundys’ discordant home life and Al’s depressing work life, with jokes mostly coming at the paterfamilias’ expense. But he was no mere put-on schlub; he was more openly bigoted than Archie Bunker and more skeptical of the people around him than George Jefferson. Al was the de facto series lead, but he was hardly a character to get behind. He was a misogynist and a bigot, who had one foot out the door. Forget all the hooting that followed his entrance in every episode; those hollers were the soundtrack for his latest failure.

Married… With Children also skewered the happy homemaker archetype, featuring a mother with a complete lack of maternal instinct and zero remorse about that fact. Sagal envisioned the character as a former cocktail waitress, so she crafted the look of someone who was trapped in a permanent happy hour: big hair, stretch pants, cigarette permanently in hand. Like everyone else in the family, Peggy lacked any real redeeming qualities, but her parental neglect was easier to play for laughs because her kids were old enough to mostly fend for themselves. But they were plenty bitter about that—even the dim-witted but beautiful Kelly could tell something was missing. She was often too busy picking on her younger brother, Bud, who made up in brains what he lacked everywhere else. The Bundy teens were also subverting the sitcom norms—Bud was a hornier, less personable version of annoying little brothers like Ben Seaver, while the prepossessing and older Kelly boldly engaged in sexual encounters that were only insinuated on shows like Family Ties and Growing Pains.

That same unusual and unflattering portrait of family life stalled out the show. Offering up what Moye and Leavitt considered a more accurate representation of American families was the extent of Married… With Children’s innovation. Its dedication to having so many unlikable characters at its core—even the Rhoades and D’Arcys next door didn’t prove to be much better in the long run—wore thin over the course of the show’s 11 seasons. There have been so many flawed families on the small screen since, with one glaring difference: All of those groups, from the Malcolm In The Middle clan to the Gallaghers of Shameless, showed some growth over time. Married… became tedious and skirted nihilism in its later seasons, churning out family feuds and dreams deferred ad nauseam. The breakup threats preceded (and mirrored) The Simpsons’ will-they/won’t-they divorce conceit, as did so many of Al’s downright cartoonish schemes and accidents.

The utter lack of morality didn’t sit well with some TV viewers, including a Michigan woman who led a boycott in 1989, which in turn led to a rise in popularity for the show. But most people who tuned in before and after the boycott didn’t do so to watch Kelly learn something or see Al score a small victory (though those things certainly happened); the show’s midsize but ardent following did so to revel in its eschewing of any values system. And that’s what they got, with diminishing returns. Here we offer 10 episodes that saw the Bundys at their best, which was the same as their worst.

With their upward mobility and more progressive values, the Rhoades were intended to be a foil to the resigned Bundy clan. Marcy in particular served as a counterpoint to Al’s misogyny, and regularly battled with her boorish neighbor on everything from political issues to aesthetic matters. Marcy and Steve’s relationship deteriorated throughout the first four seasons; she became domineering, and he withdrew. Their differences were highlighted in this season-one episode, which saw them instantly regret wanting to play house with the Bundy kids. Despite being equipped with “a game recommended by Psychology Today,” the Rhoades can’t get through to the little hellions. The failed experiment revealed that only Marcy was ready for the next step in their marriage, foreshadowing her split with Steve years later.