At the time of MWC’s appearance, the top-rated U.S. television series was The Cosby Show. In the Cosby version of family, an African-American doctor and his attorney-wife raise their college-bound off- spring in an upper-middle-class environment. Instead of such faultless people, Moye and Leavitt presented “patriarch” Al Bundy (Ed O’Neil), whose family credo is, “when one of us is embarrassed, the others feel bet- ter about ourselves.” In MWC, almost every character is amusingly tasteless and satirically vulgar.

Bundy is a luckless women’s shoe salesman who hates fat women, tries to relive his days as a high school football hero, and does almost anything to avoid having sex with his stay-at-home, bon-bon-eating spouse, Peggy (Katey Sagal). Peg loves to shop, and her ability to buy always exceeds Al’s capacity to earn. She refuses to cook, and the Bundys must take desperate measures to stay fed, frequently searching beneath the sofa cushions for crumbs of food. After one family funeral, the Bundys steal the deceased man’s filled refrigerator. Peggy’s clothes are too tight, her hair is too big, her makeup is too thick, and her heels are too high. She wants sex as much as Al avoids it.

The Bundy’s stereotypically beautiful, dumb-blonde daughter, Kelly (Christina Applegate), is a frequent target of their naive con artist son, Bud (David Faustino). Moye and Leavitt created Kelly in the guise of Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop; she can never manage to find the right word, and her verbal confusions are felicitous. According to Bud, Kelly will have sex with any available male. In one episode, Kelly acquires backstage passes to a rock concert and announces she is just one paternity suit away from a Caribbean home. The Bundys think Bud has no chance of ever attracting a date; running jokes mention his collection of inflatable rubber women. All characters have a common failing: none exercises good judgment.

In MWC, Moye and Leavitt not only lampooned Cosby but also parodied its creator, Marcy Carsey. The other continuing characters in the series were the Bundy’s upscale next-door neighbors. In the initial seasons, the neighbors were Marcy (Amanda Bearse) and Steve Rhoades (David Garrison). Garrison was a series regular from 1987 to 1990 and made frequent guest appearances after Steve and Marcy split. Then, in the 1991 season, Marcy remarried, to a man named Jefferson D’Arcy—giving her the moniker Marcy D’Arcy. Marcy and her husbands serve as a device to entice and challenge the Bundy clan, then put them down. Marcy is a banker and activist for almost any cause that will defeat Al’s current get-rich-quick scheme. She marries Jefferson (Ted McGinley) while drunk and discovers him in her bed the next morning. He has no career, although he has claimed to be a clever criminal, now living in the witness protection program.

The show had a small, loyal following until February 1989, and the producers had a history of arguments over taste and language with FOX’s lone, part-time network censor. One episode, “A Period Piece,” in which the Bundy and Rhoades families go camping, was delayed one month in the broadcast schedule be- cause it focused on the women’s menstrual cycles. Two months later, the episode scheduled for February 19, 1989, “I’ll See You in Court,” was pulled from the schedule and never aired on the FOX network. The episode involves sexual videotapes of Marcy and Steve that Al and Peggy view when they rent a sleazy motel room. When both couples realize their activity at the motel was broadcast to other rooms, they sue. The jury chooses to compensate the couples for their performance quality, with Al and Peggy getting no money.

That same winter, two weeks after “A Period Piece,” an episode titled “Her Cups Runneth Over” led to a social stir. The segment features Peggy’s need for a new brassiere, coinciding with her birthday. Al and Steve travel to a lingerie shop in Wisconsin, where an older male receptionist wears nothing below his waist but panties, a garter belt, stockings, and spike-heeled shoes. Steve fingers leather-fringed falsies attached to the nipples of one near-naked mannequin; women flash Al and Steve, although the nudity is not shown on camera.

One television viewer, Terry Rakolta, from the wealthy Detroit, Michigan, suburb of Bloomfield Hills, took offense at the show after the brassiere episode. She saw her children watching the program and found both the language and the partial nudity unacceptable for a program airing during a time when children made up a large portion of the audience. Rakolta acted by writing to advertisers and asking them to question the association of their products with MWC’s content. She also brought her cause to national television news shows.

In March 1989, Rakolta said on Nightline, “I picked on Married . . . with Children because they are so consistently offensive. They exploit women, they stereotype poor people, they’re anti-family. And every week that I’ve watched them, they’re worse and worse. I think this is really outrageous. It’s sending the wrong messages to the American family.”

Rakolta had mixed success. Some advertisers, in- cluding major movie studios and many retail stores, refused to buy commercials on the new FOX network (prime-time telecasts had started less than two years earlier). Media brokers cited a bad connotation with FOX programming. Newsweek magazine featured a front-page story on “Trash TV,” questioning the standards of taste in prime-time television. Both MWC and tabloid news shows such as A Current Affair were primary examples.

However, the greater effect of Rakolta’s campaign was strongly positive for FOX. Among the fledgling network’s greatest problems at the time of the controversy was limited viewer awareness. Many viewers simply did not know that a fourth network existed. Re- lated to this was the fact that a small, mostly homogeneous viewing group comprised FOX’s entire audience. Moreover, many FOX stations had weak UHF (ultrahigh frequency) signals that were difficult to receive. Rakolta’s complaints garnered substantial national publicity, and this seemed to assist the net- work in solving many of its difficulties. After Night- line, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and most other national and local news shows featured the controversy over MWC, viewer awareness rose dramatically. People purposely sought out their local FOX affiliates, and MWC became a success.

By April 1989, MWC had reached a 10 rating, according to Nielsen’s national measurements, the high est rating of any FOX show to that date. FOX began charging the same amount for commercials in MWC that the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) asked for 60 Minutes. The comedy began intermittently winning its time slot.

By 1995 the show had become the longest-running situation comedy currently programmed on network television, on the air as long as the classic comedy Cheers. In its final years, MWC no longer pushed new boundaries of good taste, and the jokes became routine and expected, even when still funny.

The show did, however, have an extremely lucrative afterlife in daily syndication, running strongly for years in many markets. In Los Angeles, FOX’s station KTTV ran the program twice each weekday in the prime-time access hour. Daily viewership for the show continues to be strong, and with 11 seasons of episodes to add variety to off-network reruns, MWC is likely to consistently remain one of the most successful properties in the history of television syndication. At the end of its run on June 9, 1997, the program’s off-network earnings were estimated to be more than $400 million.

During its long run, the show won no awards, but the actors were recognized for their performances. The Hollywood Foreign Press nominated the show for seven Golden Globe Awards: one for the program as Best TV-Series—Comedy/Musical, four for Katey Sagal’s acting, and two for Ed O’Neill. American Comedy Award nominations also went to Sagal (three) and O’Neill (one).