Married…With Children coming back as an animated show for some damn reason
Original stars Katey Sagal, Ed O'Neill, Christina Appelgate, and David Faustino are all on board, apparently
Aux News Married...With Children
Married…With Children has always occupied a sort of weird place in the cultural landscape—too crass to be categorized with your Roseannes in the “blue collar sitcom masterpiece” bucket, but too filled with undeniable comedy talent (and too straight-up successful) to summarily dismiss. Despite running for 259 episodes, from 1987 to 1997, the series has largely disappeared from the wider conversation…until now!
That’s right, folks: Cue up “Bad To The Bone,” and also all your jokes about not wanting to have sex with your wife, because Married…With Children is coming back—now in animated form, for some reason. This is per Deadline, which reports that Family Guy producer Alex Carter is teed up to serve as the showrunner. More important, though, is the news that moves this thing from “Jesus Christ, why?” to “Well…okay, let’s wait and see”: The reveal that series stars Ed O’Neill, Katey Sagal, Christina Applegate, and, yes, David Faustino are all on board to voice their respective Bundys.
Presumably spurred on by the fact that Sagal and O’Neill, especially, have been reliable TV performers over the 25 years since the show went off the air—and the endless necromantic urges, buried deep in the hearts of TV executives everywhere, who never met a recognizable brand they wouldn’t happily drag, Murphy Brown-style, from its peaceful grave—Deadline reports that the show is “being pitched to networks and streamers and is getting strong interest.”
From the outside, we can kind of understand the decision to go animated with this; although Faustino supposedly almost got Sony to bite a few years ago on a spinoff focused on his character, titled Bud—evidence, if nothing else, of how bad Remake Fever got in recent years—an animated show would let audiences check back in with the Bundys as they remembering them, i.e., a nuclear family in permanent meltdown. (Also: Most of the cast is pretty busy most of the time, so animation would obviously be easier on their schedules.)
The original Married…With Children still runs on streaming at Hulu and Peacock; the series was an early hit for Fox back in the late ’80s, helping put the then-new network on the map.
124 Comments
Only if they do it without constraints like the original series. If they tone it down it would be completely pointless.Cartoon adaptations of classic live action shows CAN work—the Trailer Park Boys one was pretty enjoyable. And I’d imagine Ed is getting too old to play Al except in a cartoon.
Agreed. Corner Gas Animated also worked, even with a recast of a main character (due to Actress death), who played the character in the same vein, but not quite the same. Which I would assume would have to be done with marcie…
I just can’t get into Corner Gas. The jokes and delivery are just so obvious even if the actors are all really good. His father especially. And the police chief.
I wonder if Amanda would come back—-obviously live action would be extremely awkward, but reading lines in a studio you don’t have to be in the same room with Ed.Besides, they were feuding off screen DURING the original run, and it never seemed to affect them as actors.
Corner Gas might be low-key and low-stakes, but I’ll damned if I’ve ever seen a sitcom with so little fat on it.
I guess I just find the show too Canadian. I mean, if only they would just Americanize it for us you know? Those guys up North are just too parochial with their productions imo.
In college, Corner Gas is what we would put on if we couldn’t sleep. 5-10 minutes of that white noise and you’re out like a light.
Amanda Bearse is still alive
Oh, I know (and she looks great, BTW) but I was thinking they may have to re-cast or eliminate due to how much she really, really didnt get along with Ed O’Neill.
I do wonder how the crassness of the original would play now. I mean, it wasn’t ever not-controversial, but I’m not sure how well a lot of it holds up.Then again, F is for Family did a decent job of walking the same line, though it wasn’t nearly as popular and setting the show in the 70s probably gave them some leeway.
I tried watching it a few years ago and MwC is mostly terrible and cringe now.Al sells shoes, Peg likes bonbons and is sexually unfulfilled, Marcy has small boobs, Kelly is a slut but Bud can’t get any. It is the same jokes over and over and over.
Honestly, of all the random resurrections of shows this one actually could make a lot of sense if done right.
Trailer Park Boys without Clattenburg is absolute dogshit.
Meh, some of my favorite episodes were in season 8.
I feel like people remember that show being a lot raunchier than it actually is.Big Mouth, It’s Always Sunny, South Park, etc. are like easily 10,000x less “toned down” than even the (honestly pretty boring) banned episode(s) of Married With Children ever were.
The funny thing is, that infamous court episode wasn’t *really* any more raunchy than any other episode primarily focused on Peg wanting to get laid.As for Always Sunny, it aired a decade after the last episode of MWC, so its kinda hard to compare the situations.But, I’d always make the argument that the Seinfeld (somewhat a contemporary series) episodes about abstaining from self-pleasure and Jerry describing oral sex techniques to George were at least as raunchy as anything that ever occurred in MWC’s run.As for South Park, they get away with things that would never fly in anything but an adult cartoon, even today.
But that’s my entire point, people always love saying “omg that should could neverrrr happen today!” yet what we have today makes Married With Children look like something you would have seen on ABC Family or something lol.and yeah, that episode was pretty boring, and is no longer banned and is in active syndication because it’s not even as edgy as an episode of like Family Guy lol.
indeed, its still on once in a while, it probably would piss of a lot of people with short fuses but it its only good that way
And bring back Marcy and both her husbands!
Married with Three’s Company (2022 version)
Come and knock on my doorWe’ve been waiting for youWhere the kisses are hers and hers and*flush*
The last episode of the series will have a character voiced by Ted McGinley, and as soon as he enters the house, it just explodes. Then the credits run in silence.
I wonder if he’s ever done a Random Roles.
Ha! https://www.avclub.com/ted-mcginley-talks-happy-days-the-west-wing-and-being-1798231453
Last I heard she and Ed O’Neill had some bad blood. So she may be out.
Another reason an animated series makes sense—AFAIK Amanda wouldn’t have to be in the same room as Ed ever.
Reading up on it, O’Neill really doesn’t come off looking good in it…http://www.tvparty.com/80-married.html“I have to say that when she started out,
she was gay, she was gay a long time. She was more or less the female in
the couple; she was very, very feminine and cute. And then as the
show… 11 years it went, as it progressed, the change took place where
she then was the more masculine of the two. She had several
relationships over that time, and that became kind of interesting
because then as she became more masculine, she became a little more
snarky. She could grow a tooth, as we used to say.”“Another time we got in a big fight over something stupid in
the makeup room. And she said something about you’re a bully or
something, and I said, ‘Well, you’re miserable.’ It was just bad… In
front of everybody, by the way. And then I said, ‘You’re not very
bright, is your problem.’ And she was bright, but in a way she wasn’t
because I said look… She said, ‘I’m not bright?’ And I could just see
her gearing up, like ‘I’m smarter than you.’
“And I said ‘No, because I’ll tell you why. I have a button I
could push. That button says ‘Get rid of Amanda Bearse.’ You don’t have a
button that says get rid of it Ed O’Neill. Your button doesn’t work.
Mine works.’ Now, this was a mean thing to say: I never was going to
push that button, but it was true. I could go to them and say ‘I can’t
work with her. I go or she does.’ Who goes? So that was kind of bad.”
There was also the thing about Ed and David not being invited to Amanda’s wedding because they made fun of two women walking down the aisle.
Right before Wilson meets his demise.
The Ferguson.
The King of Bowls. The Ferguson.
It’s the Stradivarius of toilets. The Ferguson.
Ha ha. Stupid fucking Kinja. There are all the Ferguson comments. Can’t hide the Ferguson, Kinja.
If they got the voice actors from the Japanese dub of this episode of The Simpsons to dub them in this new series, I would watch it. There’s something so deadly serious about their delivery that I find kind of hilarious. Like they’re doing Married…with Children as a Kurosawa film or something.
Japanese Tim Allen sounds a lot like Mr. Sparkle.
You like Mister Sparkle?
Why does the grunting sound like water going down a drain?
Futurama did it better! ( plus had actual Peg)
Mm. No, Peg.
… I want references to their other shows. Let Peg have a bad day where she accidentally dyes her hair purple and has to wear an eyepatch. Have Al contend with a HOA meeting involving a gaggle of modern families. Bud gets a scarf and thinks it gives him magic fire powers. Have Kelly lose her memory, realize she’s been an awful daughter, and try to make it up to her parents (yes, that one’s a deep cut, but it’d be fun meta commentary, cuz no one remembers Samantha Who). GO. WHOLE. HOG. 😀
You know, Kelly did canonically get a job as a weathergirl.
Maybe she turned that into a gig as an anchorwoman.
I was gonna make a joke about Bud not getting any jokes because David Faustino’s career going south but I just realized that he has went on to being a pretty successful voice actor. Didn’t realize he was Mako in Legend of Korra
He turned up on an episode of Entourage as himself. He was supposed to be in Drama’s acting class.
YES what they need to do is use their ownership of the material that NOW Comics provided in the early-mid 1990s and do stuff like QUANTUM QUARTET
I’m having a hard time thinking of a property that would work less in 2022 than Married with Children.
Hogan’s Heroes
Touche.
The problem with Hogan’s Heroes airing today is that too many Republicans would sympathize with the Nazi characters.
Dey know NUT TING!
Yeah it’d be a gritty reboot where the Nazi’s are sympathetic (and super masculine handsome) and The Heroes start coming to see things from their side. The final episode they turn on Hogan (Who is a non-binary radical woke lefty) and execute him.
Also the Holocaust never happened/was greatly exaggerated.
Are you saying a show about a high-school educated retail clerk who is a suburban homeowner and the sole breadwinner of a family of four is somehow NOT RELEVANT to today’s audience?
Come on, they couldn’t even afford to vacation in Hawaii, so they had to go to Florida instead! And England. And Vegas. And…
Well, they drove to Florida in the Dodge. England was an all expense paid trip to lure Bud and Al to Lower Uncton to get murdered. Vegas was Peggy living on just-dumped Marcy’s money, then Al driving out there after Peg overloaded his credit cards in Vegas, not really a vacation.And yes, I have watched this show way too many times.
While those are all valid points, they still require the sole breadwinner, an hourly employee, to take time off from work.
And can you imagine how much food that dog ate? (Buck, not Bud).
Well, to be honest, 80 pesos should have had him and the entire family living in a cardboard box.
To be fair, that part of the show didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the 80s-90s either.Remember Al’s paycheck?“Al Bundy, 80 pesos”
Al made comically little money but the 80s were the last time it was still possible to get a retail job out of high school and rise high enough that you could support your family. You were defiantly at the low low end of middle class but a modest home was possible. By the 90s you needed a college degree or at least some college to even think about making enough to own a home. By the aughts even more so. Now, even degrees past bachelors don’t guarantee finding a job where you can own a home and getting them will put you in crippling amounts of debt.
All of that is absolutely true, but Al never rose above the level of shoe salesman—to my knowledge he never became anything like a supervisor or manager.There is also another factor to consider—-Peg always came home with tons of shopping bags (she spent all of Al’s sad paycheck) meaning that whatever paltry amount Al was making got spent on frivolous luxuries anyways.
Not being a rich investor or a plastic surgeon means you don’t make enough to buy a home, these days.
Someone in another comment, on another married with children article years ago, did the legwork and math and actually found the neighborhood outside chicago the establishing house was filmed in and was able to prove it would have been possible at the time for a family of four to just scrape by on Al’s salary, like it was presented in the show. I’m not going to go searching for it, but you could probably dig it up if you looked. The part people often forget is that in the early to mid 80s, when Al would have bought the house, it wasnt uncommon to buy a home for 20 or 30 thousand dollars and pay two or three hundred dollars of month in the mortgage. My parents bought the house I grew up in, a three bedroom, two bathroom cape on a quarter acre, on long island (40 minutes outside of Manhattan) for twenty three thousand dollars in 1984.
That was the whole point of the show. It was a lark on the idea of the white man’s burden. He’s an hourly shoe salesman and he’s got a hot wife, a two story house, and two cars, but he’s always crying about how poor he is and how his wife isn’t attractive enough to have sex with, his life sucks, etc. I think it would play great now.
Please no NO MA’AM and reporter-with-the-long-name material. The later years of the original run were brutal to sit through.
“Presumably spurred on by the fact that Sagal and O’Neill, especially, have been reliable TV performers over the 25 years since the show went off the air”The Christina Applegate shade smh
They didn’t want poor Bud to be all alone.
Grandfather B.
Gaspasser B
Dustbuster B.
Bedwetter B
That was the musical equivalent of Dr. Pimple Popper – I… I couldn’t look away…
Well, really she went on to become a reliable MOVIE performer. So. Check aaaaand mate.
It’s been done. Also, what’s next? ‘Unhappily Ever After’?
Just watched that episode last night!
Leela never looked better!
Cant we dismiss it though? Married With Children was bad and it should feel bad.
It’s because of people like you that “Psycho Dad” got canceled!
Who’s the man with the itchy gun?
The last 3 seasons were mediocre to bad, I’ll agree there, but other than that, pure blasphemy!
Seasons 2 (starting about halfway through I’d say) through, say 5*— are good, occasionally even great. The acting is genuinely better than you’d expect for a show like this.*up until around the point McGinley shows up– there’s good stuff after that, but the show got progressively more cartoonish as time went on.
I draw the line at season 9. Season 8 you start seeing the cracks, but its like they fired the staff from the earlier seasons and hired a bunch of hooting audience members to write for season 9+.What bothers me is how Ed went from having a truly great delivery in seasons 1-7 to an abrupt change in his performance (mostly 9+), and I’ve never been able to figure out why—-did he just give up and not care anymore? Was the writing and directing so bad that he didn’t feel like giving an effort?
Funnily enough, the same thing happened with Roseanne. I recently went back through the classic series, and everything up to the end of season 5 was pretty great. Fantastic even. Then season 6 is when things start happening that give you pause, and season 7 is when Roseanne went from a housewife trying to manage the stresses of juggling so many different things to “I’m having a bad day I’m going to make it everyone’s problem!”. But hey, they managed to pull it around with the revival series, so I guess they could do the same with an animated Married With Children.
*up until around the point McGinley shows up- This was an actual plot point on the last episode of Batman :Brave and the Bold.Seriously.
I recently saw, for the very first time, the episode where aliens return repeatedly to steal Al’s socks and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on television.
Best part of that episode is near the end when Al goes to get his film developed.Photo clerk: “Do you know anything about developing film?”Al: “No.”Photo clerk: “Well, neither do we. We kinda learn as we go along.”
Has anyone else seen that web series Star-Ving that was about David Faustino playing himself as destitute and out of work, with his friend Corin Nemec (who played Parker Lewis)? I remember one episode where Corin ran out of toilet paper and is later seen jumping naked into a swimming pool with peanut butter in his butt crack.
Yup. They also ripped of the Sunny in Philadelphia music on that show.
That show was so outrageous, would love to find a good quality stream or download. The rest of the cast of MWC were great when they were in it.
Tang don’t smoke!
Ha! One of my favorite scenes. Then Al goes blind when Marcy opens her robe to taunt Steve, and Peg makes him drink the poison.That’s another thing that never made sense about the show. They call Marcy flat and chicken legged, but even in the later seasons, Amanda had a pretty rockin’ body.
Just give me a Steve prequel series, already!
He was good on It’s Your Move with Jason Bateman. Now saving endangered sea turtles.
He was also a recurring lawyer on the L&O mothership. Was in one of the classic episodes defending a man that McCoy and the Judge were conspiring against to railroad.
According to what we know about his past, Steve was a nerd in high school and owned a Mustang before he met Marcy.That pilot they were trying to set up with “Radio Free Trumaine” had a promising idea of him being the ‘evil dean’, but at that point the writing on MWC was a mere shell of its glory days, and it just ended up being a mediocre episode that gets lumped in with all the rest.BTW, a young Elizabeth Jennings was in that spinoff pilot.
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The award winning English poet!? Wow!
Married… With Children is also shown in marathon on Logo. I always found that a little puzzling, though I’m not complaining!
It was extremely misogynistic (although Al and his friends always got their comeuppance) but it was surprisingly progressive when it came to LGBTQ issues. There were definitely jokes at the expense of the community but they were the kind of stuff you’d see on The Golden Girls too.
And the episode where Peggy starts going out dancing with a man only for Al to be confronted by the man’s jealous husband (and then Al and the husband start having their own emotional affair) was strangely progressive for the time. After the initial guffaw that Peggy’s new friend is gay, they’re not treated as jokes (and I think it was one of the first episodes of a television series to have a two gay men refer to one another as husbands). There was also the plan to have Glenn Milstead/Divine playing Peggy’s gay uncle and mother in semi-recurring roles (Divine passed away the morning of the first dress rehearsal).
Dan Castellaneta, in one of his recurring roles on the show played the gay husband of the man Peg was dancing with.Al literally ‘fell in love’ with him because he cooked, worked, cleaned. Which in a way trivializes the gay community by suggesting people just decide to be gay.Finally, the episode ended with Al saying “He was a homo, Peg.” —-not really that progressive.I love the show, but I also realize it was highly flawed in its mysoginstic and generally insulting manner. Well, I loved it up to about season 9 when the quality went right off a cliff and it became just a parody of itself.
It was very clear that Al “falling in love with him” was purely platonic and not that Al was suddenly attracted to men. And – in the context of the time – the “He was a homo, Peg;” line is the standard casual homophobia that you’d see in almost nearly sitcom, including ones that are praised for their handling of LGBTQ+ subject matter like The Golden Girls and Designing Women. Hell, even communities adjacent to the gay community were game for The Golden Girls. Sophia’s son was a happily married father who just happened to enjoy wearing women’s clothes and that was the joke. At least until they decided to treat it seriously at which point the nicest aspect of the joke – that Sophia was openly supportive of her son’s lifestyle and never chastised him as a child and buys him women’s clothes for Christmas as an adult – is flipped and suddenly Sophia is openly hostile towards her daughter-in-law because she didn’t stop her son from wearing women’s clothes.
“ine is the standard casual homophobia that you’d see in almost nearly sitcom”Right….so, not really progressive.
actually amanda bearse played her lesbian twin sister
Christina Applegate is dealing with MS, so I’d imagine an animated series is the best way to get her involved.
Agreed. Christina did an audio book recently, so this would work best for her.
Oh shit, for real? I hadn’t heard that. Fuck.
The poor girl can’t catch a break. First, breast cancer in her early 30’s, and now this.
The irony here is that a live action sitcom about a
dysfunctional family would be MORE of a novelty at this point. What animated sitcoms feature a family that ISN’T a giant mess? King of the
Hill?
I mean the show ran for 11 seasons. What possible new material could they wring out of the premise? Unless they pull a Happy Days/Laverne and Shirley and have them go into space or something. And is it gonna be 90s era Married or is everyone gonna be 25 years older? Because that might just work as the single most depressing animated series this side of Bojack Horseman.
Somebody suggested a reboot starring Faustino and Applegate as adults, with Al and Peg as grandparents. It might have worked better than a cartoon, but AFAIK, that never even reached preliminary planning.
I think they should really up the shock value and have Faustino and Applegate MARRIED!
Married…in a Trailer Park
I’d really like it if this pop culture website seemed to enjoy pop culture a little bit more. Does the world need an animated Married with Children reboot? I’d guess not. But if done right, why couldn’t it be a fun thing?
“But if done right, why couldn’t it be a fun thing?”It all comes down to if they can get the right writers. The last 3 seasons of the show lost all of its classic era writers, and the show become its own punchline, so this could indeed be terrible.
“But if done right, why couldn’t it be a fun thing?”That applies to most ideas tbf
Never understood the no sex with the wife thing… until I was married.
Weren’t “Flintstones” and “Jetsons” cartoon remakes of “Honeymooners”? I could never understand why people thought Jackie Gleason was funny when he abused and bullied his wife and friends.
Honestly, what even is this series without the howling, catcalling studio audience?
“The adventures of Buck, Lucky, and Seven” – In Space!
My guess is that there was probably a reboot deal in the works when Christina Applegate was diagnosed with ms so they pivoted to animated?
I’m only down if this goes totally Saturday morning cartoon style high concept(like Gilligan’s Planet or the Happy Days show that invoked the Fonz and gang time traveling) “Married…with Children…ON MARS?!”“Peg, I only agreed to this stupid contract because I thought it could get me out of my terrible job, but now I have to pay off Elon Musk for my interplanetary move by working at the only women’s shoe store on Mars!”“Where you get there by tube and the dancers have three boobs, at the Mars nudity bar”
Ha! Actually Al fantasized about women having 3 boobs—his rationale was “one on the back for dancing”.
I told my wife about this and she shouted, “Cool!” I clearly married the right woman for me.
Everyone except Faustino has done well for themselves since that show ended. He must be ecstatic to be working again.
This show helped give us Fox News. Just saying…