Al Bundy, Patron Saint of MAGA Hatters

The other day I talked about King of the Hill and the Republican Party.  Also recently Hulu added all 11 seasons of Married With Children.  That was a show that in the mid-80s blazed the trail for Roseanne, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and right up to Modern Family, which also stars Ed O’Neill.

Married With Children focused on the low-income, dysfunctional Bundy family.  Patriarch Al Bundy was a former high school football star (he scored four touchdowns in a single game!) who married his high school “sweetheart” Peg and they had two kids:  the blonde bimbo Kelly and the perverted loser Bud.  What the show did was take the old All in the Family formula and amp up the bickering and bantering and add a lot of crass potty humor.  It was the first real hit for the upstart Fox network and is still probably their longest-running live action scripted show.  Honestly, I can't think of another Fox live-action scripted show that had 11 seasons consecutively.  I mean I think they recently added a season to the X-Files so it might have technically gotten there, but I don't consider it really the same.  What other ones might have gone that long:  90210 or Melrose Place?  (And I said live action and scripted so not The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Idol, Cops, or America's Most Wanted.)

Watching it in modern times you can see the similarities between Al and the stereotypical MAGA hat wearing guy.  He’s a poor blue-collar slob but thinks he’s superior to most everyone.  Doesn’t like foreigners.  Doesn’t really like gays.  Doesn’t like women unless they’ve got big hooters and are showing them off.  Especially doesn’t like “political correctness” espoused by his yuppie neighbor Marcy.  And he’s got a big mouth that’s not afraid to say all those things.  It’s not hard to imagine him wearing a MAGA hat and shouting about building a wall.

The only real differences are that Al didn’t have a bunch of guns and like Dale of King of the Hill he wasn’t really openly racist.  Misogynist, hell yes.  Xenophobic, definitely.  But not racist.  In fact in the last few seasons they added a black co-worker for him to be friends with.  I guess in the 80s/90s it was OK to hate women, foreigners, and gays but not people of color.  Make of that what you will.

You might wonder then why I even watch the show.  Why not?  I used to watch The Simpsons and Family Guy all the time and this is basically a live action cartoon.  And I’m poor and my luck usually seems on par with the Bundys.  I think the “Bundy Curse” is pretty much a real thing for people like me:  if you have any good luck, you’ll get an even greater amount of bad luck to cancel it out.  So if something good happens, watch out!  But I’m probably more like Bud than Al, the slightly more evolved caveman. Lol

Anyway, if your MAGA hat friends have streaming, tell them to watch this show because they’ll probably enjoy it.

A fun thing about watching this show now is there were a lot of people with bit parts who went on to do better things.  If you watch you’ll see actors like Paulie Shore, Tiffany Amber-Thiesen, Joey Lauren Adams, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jane Lynch, Jerry Springer, Bill Maher, Armin Shimmerman (Quark of DS9), Casper van Dien, and even Homer Simpson himself Dan Castellaneta.  (There are more I can’t remember.)  Though perhaps the most interesting one was they actually had one of those tacky episodes to set up a spinoff that would have starred Matt LeBlanc.  It’s funny to think had that spinoff been greenlit and lasted a couple of seasons, someone else probably would have been saying, “How you doin’?” to women on Friends.  Maybe we'd have been spared Joey.

A while back when I had basic cable I watched one of those E! True Hollywood Stories about this show and I’m pretty sure it said originally the role of Peg was supposed to go to Roseanne Barr but then she wound up with her own show on ABC instead.  Another Fun Fact is there was one episode “The Period Show” Fox wouldn’t air because it dealt with Peg, Kelly, and Marcy all getting their period at the same time while they were with their husbands and Bud in a cabin in the woods.  For all the crude humor and that’s where they drew the line?  It’s weird.  But you can watch it now on streaming.

(Sorry, this was kind of a thin premise for an entry.)