Hacker Cinema
Married... with Children
1987 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 11 seasons
Created by Michael G. Moye, Ron Leavitt
Al Bundy is an unsuccessful middle aged shoe salesman with a miserable life and an equally dysfunctional family. He hates his job, his wife is lazy, his son is dysfunctional (especially with women), and his daughter is dim-witted and promiscuous.
3 positive2 negative28 neutralfrom 33 commenters
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34 comments on Hacker News
I don't entirely place the blame on boomers for the raise of 1950s nostalgia and the corresponding misalignment of economic goals.
Someone (not a baby boomer) working in a traditional blue collar job today looks back at the portrayal of life in a rerun of a 1970s sitcom - Happy Days (or spin off, or even an "average" person sitcom from the 80s... Roseanne, Married with children) on late night cable and wonders what it would take to have that lifestyle today? Well, taxes are taking too large of a chunk of the family budget so people gravitate to candidates that say they'll cut taxes.
Though, they're missing out on the 1950s tax structure... where people making $200,000 (1950s dollars - about $2M in 2020s dollars) were getting taxed at 91%. Corporate tax rate was much higher too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates
The plank of "we're going to raise taxes" doesn't get as many nostalgic votes for people hoping to return to the lifestyle of the 1950s.
There's a whole lot of other factors too.
A right leaning 30 year old today is voting to try to have what they perceived how it worked in the 1950s from shallow portrayals of the period.
From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF
Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.
And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)
that's america for me when I was a kid
Roku loves auto changing to really innapropriate shit after the kid appropriate episode ends.
For example, start an episode of Mittens and Pants for four year old, at end of episode, instead of playing next episode, it switched to Married With Children.
> most HNers grew up in middle and upper-middle class households in the 1980s-90s that in most cases weren't representative of the lives the median American would have lived then, and a lot of the rose tinted glasses appear to betray that upbringing
Guilty as charged! I also do think that there’s an additional sense within those communities of the “normalcy” of homeownership both within the spaces, and reflected back via mass culture. True, nobody in New York has an apartment like they did on Friends, but the shows made to appeal to middle class America, even the ones like Married with Children still held “well there’s a house” even though the main character is a deadbeat - this isn’t played for laughs or out of irony, it’s just the default.
Even in the 50s, 60s, and 70s sitcoms and shows you rarely see people renting - homeownership rates are pretty steady around 62% back to the 60s. Among white Americans it’s like 75% or something. So I don’t think it’s entirely rose tinted glasses, even if there is a point to be made about the biases of the HN crowd.
Parent comment was (I think), specifically talking about sitcoms from what I understood.
Sitcoms are - and I know this is a little condescending to point out - comedies contrived to exist in a particular situation: situation comedy → sitcom.
In the old day, the "situation" needed to be relatively relatable and static to allow drop-in viewers channel surfing, or the casual viewer the parent described.
Soap operas and other long-running drama series are built differently: they are meant to have long story arcs that keep people engaged in content over many weeks, months or years. There are throwbacks to old storylines, there are twists and turns to keep you watching, and if you miss an episode you get lost, so you don't ever miss an episode - or the soap adverts within them, their reason for being for which they are named - in case you are now behind with everything.
You'll find sports networks try to build the story arc around games too - create a sense of "missing out" if you don't watch the big game live.
I think the general point is that in the stream subscription era, everything has become like this "don't miss out" form, by doubling down on the need to see everything from the beginning and become a completist.
You can't easily have a comedy show like Cheers or Married... With Children, in 2026, because there's nothing to keep you in the "next episode" loop in the structure, so you end up with comedies with long-running arcs like Schitt's Creek.
The last set of sitcoms that were immune to this were probably of the Brooklyn 99, Cougartown and Modern Family era - there were in-jokes for the devotees, but you could pick up an episode easily mid-series and just dive in and not be totally lost.
Interesting exception: Tim Allen has managed to get recommissioned with an old style format a couple of times, but he's had to make sure he's skewing to an older audience (read: it's a story of Republican guys who love hunting), for any of it to make sense to TV execs.
> what happens if you have a work where e.g. the music and the script were written by different people?
This happens ALL THE TIME. 2001 A Space Odyssey, Heavy Metal (1981-Blue Oyster Cult), Rocky (1976) airing on TV without Eye of the Tiger, It's a Wonderful Life was public domain but distributors needed to pay for the soundtrack. TV shows like Married with Children and Dave airing in syndication with different opening theme songs. etc.
All over archive.org you'll find tons of classic films but with the soundtracks stripped out.
> does that mean they would have been able to make it without licensing it from the author?
yes and it's possible someone could have done it even better, had they not been required to convince investors to purchase copyright. GoT was a masterpiece, don't get me wrong, but it's a fallacy to think it couldn't have been better, or that other book adaptations could have been as good or better, without copyright being in the way.
It's a minor issue in the grand scheme, but my pet peeve is with "synch licenses" (not sure if that's even the right term), but where sitcoms can't go to home video because of stupid disputes about shitty songs that happened to be included. Did anyone watch "Married With Children" because of Frank Sinatra's song "Love and Marriage" in the intro? It's a catchy song, and I'm sure it lured people in who might have otherwise changed the channel, so yes it has value. But it should only be a tiny fraction of the royalties for a full performance of the song. doubly so for home video releases. Would anyone buy even 1 season of MWC just to hear the Sinatra song? I say no. And therefore should not be required to pay any royalties.
I am watching "Murphy Brown" reruns from pirateflix because apparently it never went to home video because of license disputes about the 60's soul songs in the intro. They add character to the show, for sure. But they're not why I watch the show. I watch it for the story and the acting. In this case, actors (who worked extremely hard over 10 seasons of that show!) are being wrongfully deprived of royalties because record execs can't be reasonable about how much 10 seconds of a 60 -year-old song is worth.
> Social decay is a real phenomenon
Calling this decay is an incredibly short sighted view of the actual changes that are happening. Kids used to grow up in toxic households with parents fighting and hating each other. Just look at old TV shows like Married with Children and The Honeymooners.
Now they grow up with an absent parent. I'm the latter and I'm really happy my parents chose divorce over keeping up appearances and giving me a shitty life. Domestic abuse in general has also been on a pretty steady decline because of the decrease in societal pressure to stay married.
That reminds me of the episode of Married with Children where Al calls for the family to get in “fox viewing positions” and everyone takes an antenna somewhere in the room. This was literally me as we lived somewhat rural and i could pick up signals from other towns if i put tin foil on the rabbit ears and touched the lamp when watching. I felt like I was cheating the system somehow.
To elaborate a little, I watched season 1 of married with children a while ago and it struck me as a more modern I love Lucy. I can't speak to later seasons.
The Munsters... well, I think I've seen a few episodes. I don't recall the wife (Lily) doing much in the episodes I watched, to be honest. I did see the recent Munsters movie, and Herman is both the cause and solution to their problems, Lily doesn't really do much from what I recall, if she has a comedic premise it's the ridiculousness of her falling for Herman.
Married with children was very popular in Germany because of how well it was translated.
Seinfeld was also translated but it was awfully done so people didn't watch it and it stopped running on tv.
Knight Rider was also very popular and the acting was way better than the original because of the translators.
It is quite interesting what effect dubbing of movies and tv shows can have on the perception of it.
I’ve watched every episode of married with children. But I’ve never watched Seinfeld. Only clipped shared on Instagram and even then I skip over them…
They’re both sitcoms but with very different styles. Seinfeld is a “smart” comedy and makes social commentary through the life of the Manhattanite characters. Married with Children is more of a base comedy, lampooning the old cliche of the perfect 50s household. At least that’s my take. I haven’t watched either in probably 20 years.
It seems like the primary obstacle to film preservation is copyright law. Allowing people to freely copy those old films means they are far more likely to survive.
Sometimes I hate copyright law. I bought a set of all the Rocky+Bullwinkle cartoons. Surprise, surprise, the original music was removed and replaced with some generic noise. The cartoons are just unwatchable.
Married with Children also replaced their Sinatra theme song with some generic awful music. I just have to grind my teeth and fast forward over that.
Hah, reminds me of an old Married with Children episode where Al Bundy is going to the cable provider's customer service office to buy access to a Pay-Per-View event, and, after going through a lot of hassle, is asked for his ID, which he doesn't have on him.
I don't remember exactly what happened after, but my immediate reaction was, "lol what? Why do they care about whether this is really Al? At worst, it just means some random benefactor is paying their own money so Al gets to see the PPV."
(IIRC he was paying cash too so there wasn't even an issue of CC fraud.)
People looked happy in movies and TV because that's simply how it was done. One of the things that made shows like The Simpsons and Married With Children so revolutionary was their rebellion against this artificial happiness, peeling away the veneer to show the dysfunction that was always lurking beneath. This "peeling away of layers" defined much of the 90s, and eventually led to a kind of one-upmanship to see who could be the grittiest, the most provocative, the most extreme.
There's a similar revolution brewing at the moment in Japanese TV with the release of shows like The Naked Director.
This question I take to the grave.
I understand it derails the point of the exchange, but I cannot fathom how this could be a legitimate use case. I'm not saying it's not, quite the opposite, I'm sure it was, but my curiosity has been piqued and for no reason whatsoever I must know.
It reminds me of the Married with Children episode where AL has a piece of a chorus of a song he remembered and it drove him insane until he remembered. It was hm hm himmmm and the song was I Will Follow Him, I believe.
I felt that, I had read a book as a child and it fascinated me and started my lifelong obsession with books. I could remember parts of the book, but search engines sucked for many years. I don't remember when but at some point google crawl bot scraped the synopsis of the book-it was a Forgotten Realms book 'The Night Parade'. Incidentally it was very little like I had remembered but I still loved re-reading it.
Anyway, hopefully that will happen with this question one day. I'll remember it, search it, and maybe find the answer.
In Married With Children, I hear the same woman laughing in about every episode!
I knew those already from being flooded for 40+ years with Hollywood films (all of them) and sitcoms, I know Cosby, Malcolm in the Middle, Beverly Hills 90210, Miami Vice, the Fall Guy, Seinfeld, Friends, Lou Grant, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Diff'rent Strokes, Cheers, Golden Girls, MAS*H (the best), Married... with Children, Three’s Company, King of Queens, Family Matters and on and on and on.
Basically I know the US better - or the image it projects - than my own country.
Funnily it was a huge letdown when I visited for the first time decades ago, as it felt just like a sitcom and there was nothing new really.
At Thanksgiving my ~60 year old parents were telling us that they didn’t have a microwave growing up and it blew my mind. Wikipedia says only 25% of households had a microwave in 1986 and my whole life I just assumed they’d been a staple kitchen appliance since the 1960s.
Then we had fun looking up a bunch of old TV show kitchens to see if they had a microwave. The earliest we found was Season 2 of Boy Meets World (1993) though there was a lively debate about whether the early seasons of Married with Children had a microwave or a toaster oven. Better than debating politics at least.
- The Big Lebowski: The Dude
- The Disappointments Room: David. At one point, he says that he plays Xbox and takes naps while he watches his wife Dana work, when he's asked what he does for a living.
- The sopranos: Tony Soprano has a hard time getting his son A.J. to do any work whatsoever.
- Seinfeld: George
And to be fair, the trope does have inverted instances as well, but again it seems to me to be uncommon:
- Married with children: Peg Bundy in the later seasons, Al bundy isn't much better though
> I asked for the most notable movies and shows.
And I ask god for a golden leprechaun every night, but that doesn't mean I'll get one. As a show of good faith I've spent some time researching an answer to your question, but just because you've posed a question doesn't mean you're entitled to an answer fulfilling your criteria.
Reminds me how people felt in the 70s with the wave of ideal tv shows where everything was clean, neat and nice. A lot of people liked shows such as Married with children because it was a show depicting flawed characters and families.
Looks like Married With Children was on to something back in '94:
"When the Bundy TV set blows its condenser, Al decides to try out for a place on a new sports trivia game show, hoping to win $10,000 for a new TV set as the first prize. But when he is denied because of his lack of personality, Al tries to transfer his knowledge of sports to Kelly to win the show for him. But for each fact that she takes in, another falls out."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
Have you seen the married with children episode when Al is driven crazy by a song he can't name and poorly hums it?
It's uncomfortable for me to think how this is showing my age.
"All In The Family (which doesn't really hold up anymore, but is basically Married With Children for the 70s)"
No. Absolutely not.
All In the Family tackled subjects and current events that no other sitcom in that era dared to do. The Wikipedia summary is pretty good here:
"The show broke ground in its depiction of issues previously considered unsuitable for a U.S. network television comedy, such as racism, infidelity, homosexuality, women's liberation, rape, religion, miscarriages, abortion, breast cancer, the Vietnam War, menopause, and impotence."
Married with Children was lowball humor for laughs and simulated controversy. There is absolutely no comparison.
I immediately thought of Married... with Children
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married..._with_Children
> Its theme song is "Love and Marriage" by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, performed by Frank Sinatra from the 1955 television production Our Town.
...
> The Sony DVD box sets from season 3 onward do not feature the original "Love and Marriage" theme song in the opening sequence. This was done because Sony was unable to obtain the licensing rights to the song for later sets. Despite this, the end credits on the DVDs for season 3 still include a credit for "Love and Marriage."
That 80's show married with children have an episode where the kids instantly go to sleep if someone puts a cloth over their eyes. I've been using that with great success on myself for more than a decade now :)
All right, folks; they had ASCII in the 19th century. Have it your way!
"There were no videos? Then what did you watch on MTV?" -- Kelly Bundy, Married with Children TV Sitcom.
I grew up upper-lower-middle class in a dying manufacturing town near Chicago so the The Simpsons, Married with Children, Roseanne always felt like home.
I can't agree with the article tho. I still see that same grasping in current shows like Better Call Saul, Shameless (which, aside from Season 2, is fantastic), and, in a different way, The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley.
Most comedies are just joke delivery mediums with paper thin walls. But nothing has changed, shows have always been a reflection of their creators/runners and the networks fund people who've had hits.. Family Guy was a hit on DVD/[adult swim]? Ok! Order two more joke delivery vehicles from Seth MacFarlane!
James L. Brooks had a string of hits with a strong emotional core. So after he helped get The Simpsons on the air it made sense that he essentially forced the 20-something writers to build the show around an emotional/sentimental core instead of letting it to devolve into a gag factory out of the gate.
"...old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form."
Reminds me of this Married with Children episode I've seen ;) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/
> so, how much would it cost to put in a ductless in the bedrooms?
I didn't install central air either, it's basic split units (probably the precursors to your moon rocket cooler) where the only thing you really need to get through the walls are relatively thin coolant lines that run to the outside heat exchangers. It's about 600€ per unit, I'd say. The modern ones are pretty quiet as well.
The nice thing I noticed about them is they have an efficiency of around 2.6 - meaning that for every Watt you put in, around 2.6 Watts of energy are being moved, both in or out. Obviously, that subject to some adjustment depending on the temperature gradient, but it's way more efficient than the electrical heating that was installed in my bungalow before.
> I have not seen the electric bill yet.
I remember an episode of "Married with Children", where Al brings home a ancient German AC that was made by the Nazis or something, and when they plugged it in the entire neighborhood lost power. That's what I picture is in your house ;)
Steve Jobs alone is more of a counter culture figure, with the ashram in India, and the drug use, and the whole garage story.
Zuckerberg was a kid from freakin' Harvard and Phillips Exeter. I think the Harvard thing alone disqualifies him from being a counter cultural figure, especially since he has always seemed squeaky clean and fairly intelligent.
As far as the nerds "winning" -- I thought that was the way of the world. Napoleon wasn't some giant, neither was Bill Gates. The idea that the jock's best years are in high school is a pretty well-known trope at this point, often used to comedic effect in movies like Revenge of the Nerds -- or TV shows like Married with Children.
Well-off kids doing well for themselves is hardly unusual or counter cultural -- it's more like that's what we would expect with the advantages afforded to them.
There was a 1991 episode of "Married With Children" where Al Bundy creates "God's Shoes" which look exactly like these shoes. There is nothing novel or new about this idea.
I'm assuming from your profile, that your bingo card creator is what we're talking about and have to say that I find this discovery fascinating, but am not surprised. When ABC ran it's Primetime Bingo TV show last season, my wife was printing like 30 cards to follow along from home. She loved it. And, not for the chance to "win fantastic prizes" either (1. Math Degree, so she knows the Odds; 2. The "everybody wins" prizes were like $5 gift cards if I remember).
I would have guessed that "Married with Children" just made up the Peggy Bundy loves Bingo part of the story, but no--Girls apparently dig Bingo.