The Hidden Brilliance Of Married With Children
August 20, 2011 Posted by
Married With Children was an equally opportunity offender; men, women, minorities, homosexuals, animals,children, religion – nothing was off limits for a joke. The show should be an antonym in the thesaurus for “politically correct”. Peg essentially flipped the bird at the standard notion of what a housewife should be, Al refused to even act like his dreams weren’t broken and his life wasn’t pathetic. Nobody white washed the peach faced Kelly being a tart, the show’s endless parade of female eye candy, or Bud being anything but a smart aleck boy hooked on porn and blow up dolls. The couple next door – Marci and Steve, or later, Marci and Jefferson – represented that couple everyone knows who spins their wheels trying to stay satisfied with each other and a step ahead of the game.
Married With Children grabbed our attention because it refused to conform to the standard blueprint of television family programs. It refused to be sterile, it refused to be fake. It refused to insult its viewers by presenting yet another canned-laugh show. For these reasons Married With Children was totally American in it’s essence; whatever it had to do, it did it, like it or not.