How One Nervous Mother Almost Got ‘Married… With Children’ Canceled
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe below is an excerpt from Married… With Children vs. the World: The Inside Story of the Shock-Com that Launched FOX and Changed TV Comedy Forever by Richard Gurman.
Season 3 of Married… With Children was to the family sitcom what The Godfather Trilogy was to the gangster film, except Married had more senseless violence, gratuitous sex, and a less sympathetic family.
The blood started flowing early on Married when we shot what was supposed to be our third season (1998–1999) opening episode, “A Period Piece.” The period in question was a shared menstrual cycle—Peggy, Kelly, and Marcy—which came, as fate and sitcom traditions would have it, at the worst possible time. Not only did it disrupt a temporary truce among the usually hostile Bundy/Rhoades neighbors who had decided to share a weekend vacation together in a one-room cabin in the wilderness, it triggered primal instincts in wild animals that surrounded the cabin, trapping the families in.