Married... with Children
Fox's first primetime series and television's proudest anti-family sitcom: Al Bundy the hard-luck shoe salesman, Peggy, Kelly, Bud, the couch, and Sinatra singing "Love and Marriage" over it all. A 1989 boycott meant to kill it instead made it huge — and after 11 seasons it vanished without a finale.
When the new Fox network set out to build a primetime schedule, Married... with Children led the way — its April 5, 1987 premiere made it the first primetime series ever broadcast on Fox (the network's second show overall, after Joan Rivers' late-night Late Show). It was the deliberate anti-family-sitcom: crude, broke, and unsentimental, the opposite of the era's wholesome family television. Ed O'Neill played Al Bundy, a former high-school football player stranded as a hard-luck women's shoe salesman, hand wedged into his waistband. Katey Sagal played Peggy, Christina Applegate played Kelly, and David Faustino played Bud. The couch was the show's throne, where Al's weariness framed each episode's catastrophe.
In 1989, Michigan homemaker Terry Rakolta watched an episode called "Her Cups Runneth Over" and set out to lead a boycott of the show. Major sponsors — Gillette, Warner-Lambert, and Coca-Cola — pulled their advertising. It should have wounded the show badly. Instead, the boycott backfired spectacularly: the controversy intrigued viewers who hadn't been watching, they tuned in to see what was so offensive, and the ratings jumped dramatically. The show advertisers fled became unmissable television.
Over 11 seasons and 259 episodes, Married... with Children became one of the longest-running sitcoms in American television history and the longest-running live-action sitcom ever to air on Fox. Christina Applegate's Kelly Bundy became one of the era's defining television characters, and the theme — "Love and Marriage," written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen and performed by Frank Sinatra — bookended a decade of family catastrophe.
The ending, though, never came. The show didn't close on a cliffhanger, but it was widely expected to be renewed for a twelfth season — and when Fox cancelled it in 1997 instead, there was no resolution and no proper series finale. The run ended with the June 9, 1997 broadcast, and one of the longest-running sitcoms ever simply stopped.
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