Married With Children was nominated for an Emmy award, not just once, but seven times. Unfortunately, they never actually took an award home to Jeopardy Lane! It was hard to believe, because the show was very successful. The same goes for Baywatch . These two are the only shows that never won the award despite the fact that they were running for so long.
As a very successful show, Married With Children really deserved an Emmy award. It can be hard to understand why it didn’t take one home, because many people loved the show, and it was consistently popular over its ten year run. It might be because of the controversies? We’ll probably never know for sure.
Peggy’s Hilarious Maiden Name
Believe it or not, Peggy’s maiden name, Wanker, is actually a swear word in British and Australian slang. This was, of course, unintentional, because the word was not used that way in 1987 America. The producers would not have used it had they known its common use in other parts of the world.
With the internet and globalization revealing the other shade to Peggy’s Wanker moniker, it’s become a hilariously awkward maiden name for the character to bear. No modern show would use the word as a name. However, this was definitely not the case at the time the show was made. The word only became popular in British slang in the late 80s and early 90s. Knowledge of it didn’t really spread to the States until the advent of the internet.
Mixing Plots
Ed O’Neill appeared in the 1991 movie, Dutch . A typical comedy-drama film about a working class man who volunteered to drive his girlfriend’s teenage son from his school to his mom’s house, with the intention of getting to know him. The trip led to some mishaps, but later on to bonding, and of course, the two became close.
The movie was pointed out twice on the sitcom Married With Children . It was certainly intentional, in order to promote the movie. One time was when Al was on an airplane, and another when he and his wife Peggy rented a movie to watch together at home.
An Episode Was Banned
One episode of season three in 1989, entitled “I’ll See You in Court,” was refused to be broadcast by Fox because it had racy content. Even by Married With Children standards! At the time, Terry Rakolta (Mitt Romney’s sister), who was a Michigan housewife, was attacking the show. She even paid for advertisements telling people not to support the show. The first damage she did was a letter writing campaign that disabled the show’s funding and postponed the banned episode forever.
The producers of the sitcom definitely fought back. Some parts of the episode were changed and, in 2002, the episode was finally released on FX, and the wait was finally over. In case you were wondering, the episode featured a model whom Al Bundy was eyeing.
The Fake Dodge
Much like Visa being displayed as Vista, some of the lesser known facts of the show are just unbelievable. The sitcom had a number of uncanny objects and artifacts which just did not match up to reality. One example of this is that the Bundys' ‘mighty Dodge’ was not actually a Dodge.
If you look carefully, it’s actually a vinyl top, 1972 Plymouth Duster. On the show, it was always referred to as a Dodge, even though it was a Plymouth. The two cars belong to the same company and, to be fair, they do look pretty much the same, but it still made for a bit of confusion among car-loving fans of the show. Again, we wonder whether it was done on purpose or just an honest mistake.