Married… with Children, the greatest sitcom in the history of sitcoms, is on the comeback trail with the four original stars, only this time it will be animated.
Family Guy executive producer Alex Carter is leading the charge, and the original Bundy family has signed on: Ed O’Neill (Al), Katey Sagal (Peggy), Christina Applegate (Kelly), and David Faustino (Bud).
Apparently, the show is being shopped to various networks and streamers, and there’s plenty of interest.
Married… with Children, which originally aired for 11 seasons between 1987 and 1997, helped establish Fox as a legitimate broadcast network. Along with The Simpsons and In Living Color, Fox soared because it offered something different: edgy, no-holds-barred, nothing-sacred humor — something you couldn’t get anywhere else during primetime, something that’s almost extinct today.
Married… with Children has been my favorite sitcom for 30 years, a show in constant rotation in my house. Other than Abbott & Costello, nothing makes me laugh harder than the adventures of the Bundys. This era of stifling, cowardly, conformist Woke Nazism has only made me cherish it all the more.
No sacred cow was off limits. Everyone and everything took a beating, from Dan Quayle to Oprah to George Bush to feminists to homosexuals to American consumerism to motherhood, the nuclear family, hippies, animal rights activists, apple pie, fat women, Christians, machismo, dumb blondes, rock stars, Christmas, uptight moralists, and pretty much anything anyone holds dear.
The show is filled with male and female eye candy. And it was beyond irreverent — blatantly politically-incorrect, anti-authority, gloriously sexist, gloriously misandrist, a celebration of living life on your own terms, and gut-splittingly hilarious.
Outside of a perfect cast, including Amanda Bearse as Marcy Rhodes (a brittle, feminist yuppie) and Ted McGinley as Jefferson (a scheming pretty boy), what made the show work was its seamless mix of heart and misanthropy. The Bundys are a family that lies and schemes and insults one another non-stop, but heaven help any outsider who tries the same (unless, of course, they are super hot or wealthy).
So how are they going to do this? How do you recreate this mix under the chill of today’s Woke McCarthyism?
There are only two options…
Either Married… with Children will be castrated, stripped of the very wrongness that made it right, or the Woke Gestapo will have a 24/7 tantrum and then meltdown into a Chappelle-sized puddle of their own intolerant tears.
A promotional portrait of the cast of the television series ‘Married With Children,’ 1990. (L-R) David Faustino, Ed o’Neill, Katey Segal, Christina Applegate, and Amanda Bearse (standing at back). (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images)
When we think of Art That Could Never Get Past Today’s Woke Fascists, we think of Norman Lear, Mel Brooks, and Married… with Children. All three were ridiculously healthy for America. All three got us laughing at ourselves, our differences, and our quirks. And that’s exactly what’s missing from our culture today — we don’t laugh at ourselves anymore. Instead, we only ridicule, demean, point fingers, lecture, and virtue signal. This is deliberate. Laughing at ourselves brought us together. That’s the primary reason why the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s saw diminishing social or racial strife. We had come together as a country. Then political correctness was invented to deliberately destroy all of that, which destroyed art.
Whatever they do with Married… with Children, I won’t be watching. Something else I despise about this culture is our refusal to move on, to embrace The New. America used to be all about The New. We were always looking forward to The Next Thing. Then the soul-sucking baby boomers came along and decided they could never age, so the Rolling Stones are still touring, Star Trek and Star Wars won’t go away, and 109-year-old Steven Spielberg is remaking and “correcting” 61-year-old musicals.
It’s just sad.
Even Woke and #MeToo are just angrier reruns of McCarthyism.
We’re not a young country anymore. We refuse to let go. We refuse to move on. We’re narrow-minded, uptight, humorless, neurotic, and judgmental. Married… with Children helped remove the six-foot steel pole those self-important Boomers shoved up our collective ass. Those pole-free years were great years. But then the Millennial Nazis replaced that steel pole with a titanium pole, and, well, I just don’t think Married… with Children can be Married… with Children in an environment that makes Joe McCarthy look like a swinger.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.