Today in unfortunate '90s nostalgia news: An animated Married... With Children revival is in the works

Today in unfortunate '90s nostalgia news: An animated Married... With Children revival is in the works
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What goes together better than love and marriage? "Hollywood" and "foisting a revival that no one asked for on the viewing public."

EW has confirmed that Sony Pictures Television is working on an animated revival of Married... With Children, the long-running Fox sitcom about a family living their worst lives in Chicago. All four key cast members — Ed O'Neill (self-hating shoe salesman Al Bundy), Katey Sagal (big-haired, sex-obsessed wife Peg Bundy), Christina Applegate (prototypical "dumb blonde" Kelly Bundy), and David Faustino (horny youngest child Bud Bundy) — are on board to reprise their roles. (Deadline first reported the news.)

Married With Children
Married With Children

Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images The cast of 'Married... With Children'

Unapologetically crass and aggressively lowbrow, Married... With Children premiered on Fox in 1987 and helped put the then-fledgling network on the map. Created by Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye, the comedy eschewed the "family sitcom" stereotypes by portraying the Bundys as a generally acrimonious, unsuccessful, and sarcastic clan who often wanted nothing more than to get away from each other. (Still, deep down, everybody loved each other, of course.)

Currently, Sony is pitching the series to networks and streamers, but no deal is set yet. All 11 seasons of the original series are available to stream on Hulu.

This would be O'Neill's first series gig after ABC's Modern Family, which ended in 2020. Applegate stars on Netflix's Dead to Me, which is set to premiere its third and final season later this year. Sagal is currently a regular on The Conners, in which her character, Louise, married John Goodman's Dan last year.

With its raunchy humor and crude punchlines, Married... With Children was often criticized by more conservative viewers, including those running the finger-wagging advocacy group the Parents Television and Media Council. Hopefully, PTMC founder L. Brent Bozell has a fresh strand of pearls to clutch, because if the Married revival goes forward on a streaming platform, there's no limit to how filthy those animated Bundys could get.

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