‘Married With Children’ Reboot Is Destined To Fail: Here’s Hoping It Does

The Married with Children reboot now being talked about online, which would presumably put David Faustino (Bud Bundy) in the central role of perennial Bundy loser, according to KATU, has a lot of old school MWC fans excited.

I’m not one of them.

The show was terrific in its original form. You can still go back to those classic episodes from season 1 and laugh hysterically at the brazen uncouthness and lack of political correctness of the Bundy clan.

These were miserable, selfish people with a closed view of the world, and yet they were thoroughly lovable, and as a fan, you weren’t interested in seeing them change or grow. Ever.

You liked them just the way they were, even if you disagreed with their frankness and their politics (or lack thereof).

As the series progressed, it hit a lull here and there but always managed to bounce back, and some of the later episodes are among the funniest.

These were people who could freely offend anyone and everyone, and it was funny.

Fast forward to 2015, and a lot has changed since the Bundy ignorance ran triumphantly over 1990s airwaves in the Married with Children program.

Today if a comedian makes fun of a certain group, they have to weigh which group they’re making fun of for fear of having to issue an apology afterward.

College students, devoid of a sense of humor or anything remotely resembling the ability to make fun of themselves, have driven away popular comedians like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld.

And one of their new comedy darlings — Amy Schumer — felt compelled to apologize for an off-color joke she made about Hispanic men.

That political correctness has also spilled out from college campuses onto the masses.

Today, with sitcoms in particular, very few are bold enough to say something off-color, so they go for safe, mundane, boring comedy formulas (see Modern Family) and hope everyone rallies around a specific ideology in a game of philosophical “Kumbayah.”

Comedy today attempts to unify people around a single common worldview — pleasant-sounding on paper but intellectually fascist (and woefully unfunny) in execution.

People like the Bundys can’t be on television anymore without profoundly changing who they are. At one time, we could look and laugh and make fun but still see an inner depth that made us somehow like spending time with them.

A Married with Children reboot done right would incense the masses, and the show’s producers would find themselves apologizing after every episode.

https://youtu.be/qJ_PKMbdNTU

It wouldn’t be long before special interests groups would start demanding cancellation.

And frankly, I just don’t see a Married with Children reboot being that daring. I am afraid that any new incarnation of these characters would just be a defanged and boring mess, and that it would tarnish what most of us so loved about the Bundys.

So please, whoever’s behind this, for the love of all things sacred and holy, don’t let it happen. Until comedy changes and gets its groove back, leave Married with Children be. It’s too good of a show to be told through the unfunny filter of modern entertainment.

[Image of Married with Children cast via Ion Television]