Married... with Children: Difference between revisions

''Married... with Children'' is a [[Sit Com]] about consummate loser Al Bundy: Once a high school football hero dating the hottest girl in school, now a balding, starving, destitute shoe salesman -- married to the same girl who's now a useless, bickering TV junkie. He's still driving the same [[The Alleged Car|piece of junk car]] he bought in high school, and is cursed with a moronic daughter who [[Really Gets Around]], a sane, yet [[Casanova Wannabe|perverted]] son, and a dog that might as well be a throw rug.

 

 

Inspired and popularized a character type: the [[Jaded Washout]], actually previously called the [[Al Bundy]]. Also [[Trope Namer]] for [[Whoa Bundy]].

* [[A Cup Angst]]: Al constantly mocks Marcy for being flat-chested. At some points, her flatness gets her mistaken for a boy, much to her consternation, anger, and disappointment...several times. In the Pirate episode, she has to show her breasts to the crew to prove she's a lass... twice. And they're still not sure of it afterwards. And then there was the episode where [[Running Gag|she was continually mistaken for Bruce Jenner]].

* [[Aborted Arc]]: The first half of Season 6 introduced several continuing plotlines. Most notably, Peg and Marcy both wound up pregnant, and Bud began impersonating a rapper in order to get girls. About halfway through the season, all these storylines were undone by having Al wake up at the end of an episode, thinking the whole episode had been a dream. He soon finds out that in fact, the entire last six months of his life had been a dream. This was because Katey Sagal was pregnant in real life at the time, but sadly lost her baby when it came time to give birth. Out of respect, the writers made the entire storyline a dream because, according to one of the creators, "it worked for ''Dallas''".

** Al's obsession with killing the rabbit that destroyed his vegetable garden. [[Hilarity Ensues]].

** And, earlier in the series, Al and Steve were trying to catch a mouse.

{{quote| '''Al:''' Peg! My apple's gone! This neighborhood's going to hell... First a double homicide, and now this!}}

* [[Artifact Title]]: The show's working title was ''Not The Cosbys'', meant as a [[Take That]] to ''[[The Cosby Show]]''. Calling the show that would have been a pretty bad move, especially since ''[[The Cosby Show]]'' ended right around the same time that ''[[Married With Children]]'' started. The title would quickly have become irrelevant to people who started watching the show in later years.

* [[Ass Shove]]: Jefferson ends up with Marcy's boot lodged up his rear.

* [[Awful Wedded Life]]: Depending on the episode...

* [[Back to School]]: In the episode "Peggy Made a Little Lamb", Peg learns that she failed a required class in high school - home economics, appropriately enough - and goes back to re-take it. Kelly's in the same class and has to pass it in order to graduate high school. [[Hilarity Ensues]].

* [[Bare Your Midriff]]: Kelly often wore midriff-baring outfits, especially in the show's earlier years.

* [[Chuck Cunningham Syndrome]]: In the first season Al's co-worker at the shoe store was Luke, a smooth-talking womanizer who stole Al's sales. He vanished after the first season, but gets a [[Hand Wave]] [[Shout Out]] in Season 9.

* [[Children Are a Waste]]: The show is based entirely on this trope; as Al's motto says, "a man's home is his coffin."

* [[Class Reunion]]: Al and Peg go to their high school reunion in the finale for the third season. Particularly memorable in that they both get [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|Crowning Moments of Awesome]] for doing so.

* [[Clingy Jealous Girl]]: Peg, to ridiculous ends.

* [[A Day in The Limelight]]: Several.

** The episode "Look Who's Barking" centers around Buck the dog. Some episodes have him at the semi-forefront, too.

* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: Most (if not all) of the people on this show are [[Deadpan Snarker|Deadpan Snarkers]], though Al and Peg are the biggest ones.

** Buck trumps everybody in this department, even if the humans can't hear him.

* [[Department of Redundancy Department]]: "Name the Presidents" and the "Daddy" song.

* [[Determinator]]: Despite all the misery he's been through, Al still keeps on going and refuses to take the easy way out by killing himself. Al notes this on the Season 3 premiere "He Thought He Could" (where Al finds an overdue library book and confronts the evil librarian who constantly put him down as a child) that this is what makes him a winner, rather than a loser.

{{quote| '''Marcy:''' Jefferson, go down and talk to the boy.<br />

'''Jefferson:''' But Marcy, he's nuts! ''You'' go down, you're the one with the million-dollar life insurance policy.<br />

* [[Escalating War]]: The episode ''How Green Was My Apple'' starts out with Al and Jefferson arguing over an apple that's growing on a tree near their shared fence. It grows into an increasingly crazed dispute over their mutual property line.

* [[Even the Dog Is Ashamed]]: Or just senile.

* [[Exact Words]]: In one episode, Al and some of his friends tried a hair tonic that had the unfortunate (for them) side effect of making them want to have sex with their wives (or ex-wife in Griff's case). Al promised to develop an antidote, stating that a Bundy got them in that trouble and a Bundy will get them out. Cuts to a scene with Bud being forced to serve as a test subject.

* [[Fag Hag]]: [[Gender Flip|Gender Flipped]] by Al and Marcy's cousin Mandy (see [[Reality Subtext]] below). Al initially thinks Mandy is hot, but when he learns she's gay that doesn't prevent them from being good friends and going to baseball games or playing foosball.

* [[Freudian Excuse]]: It's implied in several episodes that Kelly's promiscuity stems from being starved for attention and treated as the [[Butt Monkey]] in her own family (the episode where Al invents shoe-lights lampshaded this with Kelly's (who is being used as the guinea pig for shoe-lights) line: "'Kelly, this meat is green. Taste it to see if it's good.' 'Kelly, there's a noise downstairs. Go see if it's a burglar.' No wonder I run into the arms of strange men").

* [[Friends Rent Control]]: the place might not look like much, but when you consider that it's a multilevel home and that the sole breadwinner most episodes is a shoe salesman who makes less money than an Eskimo blubber-chewer, a French deodorant salesman or a Pakistani dirt vendor, and whose failure at almost everything is a [[Running Gag]]...

* [[Fun With Acronyms]]: '''NO MA'AM:''' The '''N'''ational '''O'''rganization of '''M'''en '''A'''gainst '''A'''mazonian '''M'''asterhood.

** Also Marcy's counter-organization '''FANG''': '''F'''eminists '''A'''gainst '''N'''eanderthal '''G'''uys.

* [[Gonk]]: This was the type of woman Bud usually ended up attracting, much to his chagrin. Peg's mother was also implied to be one of this, although we were spared the horror of actually seeing what she looked like.

* [[Gypsy Curse]]: The Bundy family has multiple ones upon them. The eternal darkness in Lower Uncton is one of them, Al's smelly feet are another one, and the general successlessness of every Bundy in history is said to be yet another one.

** And how about being turned into chimpanzees by a Gypsy's curse.

* [[Heel Face Turn]]: During the seasons where Al started "NO MA'AM", Officer Dan went from being the cop who always arrested Al to being his best friend.

** More like a [[Streisand Effect]].

* [[Hollywood Dateless]] + [[Casanova Wannabe]]: Bud. It's possible that his poor performance when he actually manages to have sex is part of the problem-Ariel, Tina Yothers, and Cousin Jimmy's fiance all imply that Bud didn't exactly wow them in bed.

* [[Housewife]]: Definitely ''not'' Peg, though Al wants her to be one. Peg was brainwashed to be a competent housewife on a later season episode where Peg bumps her head on the coffee table and immediately loses her memory.

* [[I Am Not Spock]]: All the main actors are usually identified by their respective roles in ''[[Married With Children]]'', especially Ed O'Neill.

* [[Jerk Jock]]: It's implied in several episodes that Al was one of these in high school before he married Peg.

* [[Just Eat Gilligan|Just Divorce Peg]]: Many viewers wondered why Al didn't just kick Peg out, raise the kids without her poisonous influence, and have all the blonde floozies he wants. This is answered in a three-parter where they really do separate, but are shown to be in love with each other in [[Masochism Tango|their own twisted way]].

* [[The Jimmy Hart Version]]: In syndication, and in later episodes, [[Queen]]'s "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" were replaced with these.

** the theme song is replaced with this in the Hulu broadcasts.

* [[Necktie Leash]]: Marcy once did this to Jefferson when they were role-playing as Al and Peggy.

* [[Negative Continuity]]: The many stories of how Peg and Al got married? Was it a shotgun wedding orchestrated by Peg's redneck family or did Al get drunk one night and marry Peg at a wedding chapel (I ask because there was an episode where one of Al's words of advice to Bud was "Never do tequila shooters within a country mile of a wedding chapel", while other episodes imply that Peg's family forced Al to marry her [possibly because he got her pregnant]).

* [[Never Learned to Read]]: Kelly is barely literate.

* [[Never Trust a Hair Tonic]]: In an early episode, Al and Steve freak out about their baldness and try an experimental "tonic" to reverse it. Not only does it not work, but Al's dog Buck takes to the stuff better than their hair did (they were actually using some kind of dog food in their hair, and the doctor who sold it to them was a quack).

* [[Only Sane Man]]: Compared to the rest of the cast Griff seems to be the only character who is at least relatively grounded in reality.

** Steve was this, at least when he was a regular character.

* [[Overdrawn At the Blood Bank]]: On the episode where Kelly and Jefferson raise money by pool-hustling, Al sells his blood to get in on the action. He later does it again to pay the water bill.

* [[Overprotective Dad]]: Al regularly pummels Kelly's boyfriends (and one time, Bud, since Al is used to seeing Kelly bring home sleazy dates and didn't know Bud brought an actual girl home). Subverted by the fact that most of the guys she dates '''are''' scum that no sane father would allow his daughter to date.

* [[Plague of Good Fortune]]: The dreaded "Bundy Curse" brings bad luck to any Bundys who ever get lucky in ''anything''.

** {{spoiler|Except Bud, who gets laid.}}

* [[Porn Stash]]: Al sure loves his ''Big 'Uns'' magazines. At one time, he even had a collection of ''[[Playboy]]''s dating back before the '70s...which Peg sold.

** Bud loved Al's nudie magazines, too, plus his own collection.

** Perhaps the most egregious of all was how the series ended. You know that last episode where Kelly {{spoiler|almost gets married to the man who held her family hostage}}? Well, despite looking like the perfect plot for the final episode of a dysfunctional family sitcom, it wasn't scheduled to be that way. After FOX spent all of Season 10 moving "Married...With Children" to different timeslots (and made worse by the fact that ''[[The Simpsons]]'' and ''[[In Living Color]]'' were gaining in popularity), the show suffered in the ratings so much that FOX decided to shut the show down after its 11th season. According to the "E! True Hollywood Story" about "Married...With Children", the actors had a lot of different ideas for what the last episode should have been. Ed O'Neill thought that the Bundys should win the lottery right before a tornado ripped through the neighborhood and killed them. Christina Applegate built on this, saying that the Bundy house should have then landed on Marcy, a la ''[[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Literature)|The Wonderful Wizard of Oz]]''. Ted McGinley suggested the Bundys and Marcy dying or getting hurt in some horrible fashion and Jefferson ending up relaxing on the beach with bikini-clad babes all around him.

*** The last one is [[Your Mileage May Vary|probably the only case where being screwed by the network is a good thing]].

* [[Sex As Rite of Passage]]: Bud Bundy.

* [[Shotgun Wedding]]: The circumstances under which Al and Peggy tied the knot, as Peggy was pregnant with Kelly at the time. Peggy's father brings the shotgun to the couple's ceremony to renew their wedding vows to make sure Al doesn't back out of that as well.

* [[Speed Sex]]: Al is constantly mocked for his performance in bed. On of Peg's many insults: "I used to call you The Minute Man. Now I long for those days."

* [[Spinning Paper]]

* [[Spiritual Successor]]: In many ways, ''Married...'' was one of these to ''It's Your Move'', a [[Too Good to Last]] NBC sitcom from 1984 which had the same creators (Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye) and a similarly cynical brand of humor, and starred future ''Married...'' cast member David Garrison along with a then-unknown [[Retroactive Recognition|Jason Bateman]].

** ''[[Unhappily Ever After]]'', in turn, can be seen as somewhat of a Spiritual Successor (with a fair amount of [[Follow the Leader]] thrown in) to ''Married...'' itself. It, too, was co-created by Ron Leavitt.

** Oddly enough, this is when the show also started [[Growing the Beard]].

* [[Torches and Pitchforks]]: When the family's new air conditioner shorts out the neighborhood power grid, Al expresses relief that at least no one knows that it's the Bundys' fault. Unfortunately, the neighbors all correctly guess that the Bundys are responsible and form an angry mob that tries to storm the Bundy house. Kelly even [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] it when she wonders where the neighbors got the torches and pitchforks so quickly, implying that they've been waiting for an excuse to go after the Bundys anyway.

* [[Ultimate Job Security]]: The way Al insults the fat women who come into the shoe store would have gotten him fired many times over in [[Real Life]], but he manages to keep his job anyway. This troper figures it's because Gary (the store's owner) can't find anyone else desperate enough to work there...besides Griff, anyway.

** Actually Gary says the reason she won't fire him is because he would "make more money on unemployment".

** Other than Ed O'Neill, the actor most strongly considered for the role was [[Seinfeld|Michael Richards]]. (His audition ultimately helped him land Kramer, as the same casting director remembered him.)

** [[Divine]] was originally going to play Peggy's mother, but died in his sleep the night before shooting on the episode began. It's because of that that Peggy's mother is never seen, out of respect.

* [[Whoa Bundy]]: The [[Trope Namer]].

{{quote| '''Al:''' Can I get a "[[Whoa Bundy]]"?<br />

'''Everyone:''' Whoooooaa, BUNDY! }}

* [[Whole Episode Flashback]]: "The Agony and the Extra C".

* [[William Telling]]: Kelly becomes a skilled archer and accepts her opponent's challenge to shoot an apple on Bud's head. She balks at going through with it, not wanting to hurt Bud, but when her opponent accuses her of cowardice, she shoots the apple without warning, causing Bud to pass out and, upon reviving, regress to toddlerhood.

* [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief]]: An in-universe example; Al's "vacation" consisted of him sitting on the gated-off couch and TV, where he spends the week watching world themed movies.