Married... with Children

Married... with Children is an American television sitcom created by Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt for the Fox Broadcasting Company, broadcast from April 5, 1987, to June 9, 1997. It is the longest-running live-action sitcom ever aired on Fox. Married... with Children was the first primetime series broadcast on the new Fox network. The series' run ended with the episode broadcast on May 5, 1997. Two previously unaired episodes were broadcast on June 9, 1997, and June 18, 2002.

The show is set in Chicago and follows the lives of Al Bundy, a former high school football player turned hard-luck women's shoe salesman; his lazy wife Peggy; their pretty, but dim-witted daughter Kelly; and their smart-aleck son Bud. The show also features their neighbors Steve and Marcy Rhoades, both of whom Al finds annoying, and who feel the same way about him. Later in the series, Marcy marries Jefferson D'Arcy, a white-collar criminal and former CIA agent who becomes her "trophy husband" and Al's best friend.

The series is one of the longest-running sitcoms in American television history, covering 11 seasons with 259 episodes in its run. Its theme song is "Love and Marriage" by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Frank Sinatra. Critical reception was mixed during its original run, and the show's sexually charged humor and depiction of a dysfunctional family were in stark contrast to family sitcoms of the era.

The first two seasons were videotaped in front of a studio audience at ABC Television Center in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, with seasons 3 through 8 recorded at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, and seasons 9 through 11 at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. The series was initially produced by Embassy Communications. Starting halfway through the second season, it was produced by ELP Communications under the studio Columbia Pictures Television.

In 2008, the show made the top 100 on Entertainment Weekly's "New TV Classics" list, placing number 94. In May 2022, an animated revival was in the works.

In the show's pilot episode, actors Tina Caspary and Hunter Carson played the roles of Kelly and Bud Bundy, respectively. Before the series aired publicly the roles for the two Bundy children were re-cast. Ed O'Neill and the show's producers worried about a lack of chemistry with the parents and the original actors cast as the children. A re-casting was done and all of the scenes in the pilot with Carson and Caspary were re-shot with David Faustino and Christina Applegate playing Bud and Kelly Bundy.

The working title of Married... with Children was Not the Cosbys, as a mockery of family sitcoms that were common on primetime television in the mid-1980s such as The Cosby Show. Creators Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye were told by Garth Ancier and other Fox executives "to be as outrageous as they could be, doing the sort of material the Big Three would never allow on the air", wrote Daniel M. Kimmel in 2004. However, Fox CEO Barry Diller had initial doubts that Married... with Children would be successful.

For season 1, Metacritic calculated an average of 58 out of 100 based on 5 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Reviews of the debut episode were mixed. In 1987, Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times praised the casting of the Bundys, found the character development of the Rhodes lacking, and warned viewers: "The satire is heavy-handed." Conversely, also in 1987, Tom Shales of The Washington Post called the debut episode "nasty-minded, overacted and poorly cast". For The New York Times, John J. O'Connor described it as "loud, coarse and life-of-the-party vulgar". O'Connor also compared Married... unfavorably to other family shows like The Life of Riley and All in the Family, describing the show as "pure blue-collar shtick, dressed up with the usual sexual-potency and bathroom jokes".