I knew about Married...with Children. On Sunday nights, my roommate Derek and I always watched the beefcake-heavy: 21 Jump Street and Werewolf on the fledgling Fox network, but we turned the tv off when the "Love and Marriage" theme song began.
Who wanted to watch a tv show that praised the heterosexual nuclear family?
Big mistake. Married skewered the institution.
In the first season plot arc, Al and Peggy have fun trying to destroy a naive newly married couple, Marcy (Amanda Bearse) and Steve (David Garrison). They're like George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except their tactic is criticizing wives and husbands, respectively, and it works! The couple soon divorces, and Marcy hooks up with metrosexual boytoy Ted McGinley
Lots of beefcake -- Kelly had lots of shirtless, muscular boyfriends, such as Dan Gauthier, and in later seasons, Bud began to muscle-up big time.
Gay people appear only once.
Yet Married -- at least in its early years, before the downward spiral of Seasons 7-10 -- artfully revealed the flimsy foundation of the "fade out kiss," the myth of universal heterosexual destiny. In the heart of the Reagan-Bush Era of conservative retrenchment, that was worth any number of "old friend visits and turns out to be gay" episodes.
Amanda Bearse came out in real life in 1993, and the rest of the cast are strong gay allies.
Katey Sagal and Christina Applegate have made public statements supporting gay marriage.Ed O'Neill now stars in Modern Family, as the patriarch of a family that includes a gay son and son-in-law.
David Faustino played gay characters in Get Your Stuff (2000) and in Killer Bud (2001), and in Ten Attitudes (2001), he played "himself," not gay but on the gay dating circuit (for a sleazy reason). He also played "himself" in the webseries Star-Ving (along with buddy Corin Nemec). See his post here.
He's currently in talks with producers about a Married spin-off, with Bud as an adult, married...with children.
I have an armpit fetish and there is one version of the MWC opening where Bud (David Faustino) flexes and kisses his muscle. You can briefly see his armpit and it use to drive me wild every time I would see it.
ReplyDeleteDavid Faustino is amazingly muscular, and he gets completely nude in his web series, Star-Ving
ReplyDeleteLittle bit of trivia: After the success of the film 'Hairspray' (the ORIGINAL 'Hairspray'), the one and only Divine was offered a recurring role as Al's gay uncle on 'Married with Children', but he died literally the night before he was scheduled to begin filming and the character was quietly written out.
ReplyDeleteThe show really demonstrated a problem with a huge hetero trope: Bud Bundy is always said to be a virgin. Kelly teases him about this. This worked initially, but as David Faustino got older and more attractive, as his character slept with women (also attractive) in canon (and was even raped once because, you know, male victim, haha, fun-ny), the joke stopped working.
ReplyDeleteI now make a list of male characters held as eternal virgins in fanon because they're nerds but are really kinda slutty in canon?
This happens frequently to teenagers in tv shows: an actor is cast to play an unattractive character, then turns into a hunk, but has to continue the "unattractive" motif. Of course, very few professional actors are actually unattractive, since that would tend to discourage them from acting in the first place.
ReplyDeleteDavid Faustino was a total stud. He had lots of shirtless scenes that were always played for laughs but I always found him insanely sexy. Short guys always do it for me.
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