Rivals mercilessly insulted Fox. Now it’s a lesson in how to launch a TV network

[TMC]

https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...n-living-color

“Not the Cosbys”
Then there was “Married … With Children,” the raunchy multicamera family comedy that got zero Emmys in its 11-season run but that Brooks recalls “saved the network.”

“We wanted an alternative [to the Big Three] and we didn’t really know what that alternative was, but we started programming and bouncing off different creative walls as to what to do,” Diller says. “At the time, the biggest comedy on television — the biggest show on television — was ‘The Cosby Show.’ And a pilot script came in that … was known internally for a while as ‘Not the Cosbys,’ because it was ‘Married … With Children.’”



The series, which was created by “The Jeffersons” alums Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt, was everything that a sophisticated comedy like “Cosby” was not. Starring Ed O’Neill, Katey Sagal, Christina Applegate and David Faustino as the Bundy family, a foursome who said and did all the wrong things, the show encapsulated “who we are: edgier, younger, willing to go against what was the norm of the moment,” says Diller.

It also caused an attempted boycott by more conservative viewers and advertisers, which backfired as more viewers tuned in to see what all the fuss was about.

Ancier was told that the Bundy parents were loosely based on Leavitt’s own marriage to his first wife, Sharyn — a story he believes, especially after the year he visited their house for Thanksgiving and the meal erupted into a food fight.

He also stresses that not everything he got pitched, and not everything Fox aired, was memorable.

“There was never a show I couldn’t get, [but] I couldn’t get certain writers who really would not work with a fourth network,” Ancier says. “And that’s where you felt like, ‘If I’m getting this show it’s because other people have passed.’”

“The people who were behind ‘Married … With Children’ were probably much lesser known than Jim Brooks or [‘Family Ties’ creator] Gary Goldberg and [‘The Rockford Files’ co-creator] Stephen Cannell, but they were some of the best comedy writers out there,” says Ancier, adding that “they just never had had their moment to shine because they were making shows like ‘The Jeffersons.’”

[Yong Fang]

FOX made it because it broke boundries of the other three networks and took a lot of chances. But on the flip side, FOX quickly cancelled series which didnt make it immediately out of the gate. Which is arguably good and bad. On FOX, if a show didnt make numbers starting out, it was gone. The other networks would give a show usually a second season if it was middling or promising. FOX didnt. Perform the first season or die.

I think a lot of people complain of series FOX had which to them was probably good with promising first year numbers which wasnt good enough for the network. Even on this board, there are probably lots of complaints of great shows which were great but didnt meet the immediate standards that FOX demanded. My show was "The Good Guys", a buddy cop show. I loved it, but it didnt make the numbers and knew it was going to be cancelled and just enjoyed the season run. Made no difference to FOX, less than it should be, bye bye.

FOX would cancel, cancel and cancel until they had shows that worked. FOX was the most cutthroat network of the Four. Perform now or die. If Cheers was on FOX, we would never hear of it again and Ted Danson would be selling insurance (or women's shoes).