Married... With Children, the Next Generation?

[rhoenix]

As the Hollywood Reporter reports, Fox's longest-lasting live-action sitcom, Married... With Children (1987-97) could be spinning off a new series, almost twenty years after its demise.

A tone-setter for the network's brand (and which continues to this day), MWC broke ground across the dial: Proudly, smartly stupid, artistically artless, the lower-middle class Bundy story was crude in a way that the Connor family in Roseanne, debuting a year later, could never manage. Sexually grotesque, repetitive and vulgar, the show never stopped laughing long enough to look at itself, and that was the genius part: Fox staked its claim on smart non-standard fare like this, Tracey Ullman, The Simpsons, marketing it as smart-assy garbage and then waiting for TV critics (an institute you can't disparage), and higher-income families and viewers, to catch on to what they'd done to the landscape.

With Katey Segal's Sons of Anarchy ending this year, Christina Applegate's nonstop sitcom-startup business, and David Faustino's presumable availability, the show—being developed by Sony Pictures—could put itself nearly anywhere on the map. It would make the most sense to build a sequel around Faustino's Bud Bundy, although this suggestion does raise the central question: Do we really need another show about what it's like to be a sad old white man who can no longer play football? (Achieve an erection? Provide for his family on a single income? Afford healthcare? Whatever the very American problem is.)

Married... With Children inspired the last real wave of the sadsack patriarchs (name a primetime cartoon that isn't built around a Homer, Peter, Stan, or Cleveland; even the talking-dog gag was born on MWC), and in having done so may have put the first nail in the coffin. So too the self-consciously dirtbag style and proud ignorance, which has gone from bravely (if vaguely) class-transgressive, appealing to people across the board for sometimes opposing reasons, to simply representing what Americans are basically like.

To justify itself, then, the show needs to be as smart as its forebear, which means drawing outside the basic lines. My suggestion (or bet, or guess) would be a liberal inversion of the Bundy household, built around brilliant Amanda Bearse's wonderful Marcy Rhoades D'Arcy, finally the out-and-proud lesbian she was always meant to be.

Because as much as this nostalgia bullshit makes me want to puke—and '90s nostalgia is the specifically worst of them all—it's also true that specifically Married... With Children, with its darkness and repugnance and brilliance, its acidic hateful cheer, might be the perfect antidote to all this nonsense. And if we can use it to move past the hideous and degrading "buffoon father" trope in masculinity created and sold us by lazy weakling Baby Boomers, all the better.

A show that was always and entirely about outsmarting itself (for 11 seasons!) can surely be expected to meet us here, on the other side of irony, with something fresh to say. As long as it doesn't turn out to be yet another of the show's failed Matt LeBlanc spinoffs, of course.

So. This is yet more reboot nostalgia at work, something that inherently annoys me to a degree - however, I really did enjoy the show. A reboot of it... eh. I'd call myself "cautiously optimistic" at best.

[frigidmagi]

I hated that show. Never could understand why people liked it.

[LadyTevar]

It had it's moments

[frigidmagi]

Let me clear, if you liked it, fair enough. Everyone's got a right to their own opinion. That said if you said "It had it's moments" and I was in a bad mood?

My response would be "So does Syphilis."

[Steve]

Maybe the "Girl Meets World" spinoff series is making people think of this stuff.

[LadyTevar]

Let me clear, if you liked it, fair enough. Everyone's got a right to their own opinion. That said if you said "It had it's moments" and I was in a bad mood?

My response would be "So does Syphilis."

See, when someone tells me that I should watch "family Guy", or "American Dad", or things like that because that person was raving about how much they liked them, my reply is always "It has it's Moments". Because "Family Guy" et al does have moments of sheer funny. But they were not always funny, nor were they living up to all the hype they get. So, whle I fondly remember such "Married with Children" episodes as the time the neighborhood ladies realized Ted Bundy had a nice body, overall the show was forgetable. Ted and his wife were one step short of divorce, Kelly and Bud were idiots, none of them seemed to really love each other, and they never left that format.

On the other hand, "Roseanne" had a family, not a bunch of stereotypes. Ok, so they started as stereotypes, but they outgrew it within the first two seasons. Roseanne had a family very much like my own -- loving but wise-ass pranksters.

[frigidmagi]

That's fair

[Lys]

Some people like to watch other people be assholes to each other. I mean, the majority of reality TV is pretty much based on the premise. Also a lot of good jokes and stand-up comedy acts are variations on the theme, come to think of it.