For the love that is everything holy, please do not green light the Married With Children spinoff.
I know it’s easy for guys like David Fausti–Bud Bundy to get caught up in the potential payoff from resuscitating the cash cows from their childhoods like Full House did with Fuller House, but there’s pretty much no way that a MWC spinoff can possibly work in today’s society.
Fuller Blouse House worked because the show was originally so squeaky clean and family friendly, that it’s a concept that can be regurgitated at any point throughout the history of time, and it would be socially acceptable. Sure, it’s a little too lily white, but the underlying premise of the show is built around family values and living like paragons. The show can be remade any number of times, with current localization not requiring too much effort, as long as the show revolves around families trying to live like wholesome families.
Married With Children on the other hand, as much as I was a fan of the show growing up, there’s no possible way that the humor could possibly fly in today’s thin-skinned, overly-PC and anti-bullying society we live in currently.
Out of any given 22-minute episode, no less than a third of any of them were dedicated to Al Bundy making remarks about fat women, Al Bundy making remarks about Marcy D’Arcy’s lack of femininity, or Al Bundy objectifying women. Then the rest of them were any of the other characters making disparaging remarks about Al Bundy, a random woman in either a bikini or skimpy clothing to laugh tracks going WOOOOOO, and then maybe 5 minutes dedicated to some modicum of plot.
None of those things would fly in today’s society, and as much fanfare as there would be about any sort of MWC revival there could be, there would be equally as much resistance, preemptive boycotting, and inevitable failure of a show trying to climb a massively steep uphill climb.
Among all the reasons why this should not be green-lit, Bud Bundy is already aware of them, and has been quoted acknowledging them all. 99% of the jokes wouldn’t fly, and the constant need for television to push the envelope would undoubtedly result with Kelly Bundy needing to basically be naked in every episode, or some other no-name woman with a porn star’s body.
Bud is also being vague about referencing “the one thing” that is preventing this from getting green lit, in spite of the fact that he alleges that the rest of the cast is on board with the project. I can’t really imagine yet what that could possibly be, but for the sake of retaining the integrity of the original franchise, I can only hope it’s something fairly insurmountable, and preventative to this project actually taking flight.
It also doesn’t help that the mythical spinoff would revolve around Bud Bundy himself. I get that Fuller House established a template of a spinoff with the kids taking over, but honestly, there’s no reason to believe that if the show revolved around Al Bundy, now, it would still be way more interesting than something revolving around old Grandmaster B.
To rehash the title of this post, I know that the Bundy name is synonymous with failure, but that’s only in regard to the plots of the episodes. MWC as an entire body of work was quite the opposite of failure, and doesn’t need a spinoff series to take a bite out of its previous success.
