The Bundy Bonanza : Television: Fox’s bawdy ‘Married . . . With Children’ is enjoying a second wave of popularity in syndication while the new episodes keep climbing in prime-time ratings.

Ed O’Neill is miffed.

“We were the No. 2 show in the country a few weeks ago, and the only way you’d know it is some little blurb in the trade magazines saying: ‘ “Married . . . With Children” Off to a Good Start,’ ” said O’Neill, who plays Al Bundy, the man with the smelliest feet on television, in Fox’s longest-running show. “If ‘The Simpsons’ did that, they’d be on the cover of Time. In fact, I think they were on the cover of Time. It’s puzzling that we’ve been so blatantly ignored when this show has kept Fox in business for five years.”

Well, the bawdy comedy hasn’t been ignored completely.

“Married . . . With Children,” the only series still left from the network’s original prime-time lineup in 1987, came under national scrutiny in 1989 after a mother in Michigan decried it as too crass, too raunchy and too tasteless for children and many adults.

Fox’s concession was to move the show back half an hour, to 9 p.m. on Sundays. There its ratings have grown to the point where it now frequently draws more viewers than movies on ABC, CBS and NBC.

That’s not all: The first Fox show to survive long enough to be sold into broadcast syndication, “Married” reruns debuted weeknights on 170 stations this fall and have become one of the biggest hits of the young season.

In Los Angeles, “Married” has lifted KTTV Channel 11 from worst to first. Last year, with “Personalities” airing weeknights at 7 p.m., Channel 11 finished last in the time period. In its first month, “Married” has tripled that audience, moving ahead of “Wheel of Fortune” on KCBS Channel 2 as the top-rated show. The reruns have been watched in nearly 440,000 area homes each night, beating such heavyweights as “Entertainment Tonight,” “The Cosby Show,” “Love Connection” and “Inside Edition.”

In Chicago, the “Married” reruns have averaged a 19% audience share during the half-hour preceding prime time, beating everything except “Wheel of Fortune.” In New York, the show has been a strong second to “Jeopardy!” at 7 p.m., while in Washington it has finished first at 7 p.m.

Barry Thurston, president of syndication at Columbia, the studio that produces the series, said the ratings for the reruns have exceededed those of any series the company has ever syndicated, including “Who’s the Boss?”

All this popularity has made creators and executive producers Michael Moye and Ron Leavitt rich. But Moye, for one, is also baffled.

“In the very beginning, I would have sold my (profit participation) in the show for a ride home,” Moye said. “We started out basically voicing our objection to the wave of niceness that was infesting television. Television was riding the ‘Cosby’ wave and all American sitcoms had two speeds: Either people were really nice and had good sweaters or they solved all the problems of the world in 22 minutes. We wanted to rebel against that. With Fox giving us the shot--because, God knows, no one else would--we figured at most we’d have a nice run of 13 episodes.”

From the start, the show has been littered with ribald talk about sex as Al and Peg (Katey Sagal) Bundy constantly pick at each other for their swelling waistlines and deteriorating libidos. Their ditsy daughter Kelly (Christina Applegate) is mercilessly chided for her wanton backseat adventures, while her brother Bud (David Faustino) is ridiculed for cavorting with life-size rubber dolls. And while he generally avoids sex with his wife, Al’s fantasies frequently feature the most curvaceous models in all of television.

Moye said that he had a feeling other people shared his disdain of the standard sitcom and might be open to the humor in “Married.” But because of the renegade nature of the show, he never thought it would make it to mainstream syndication.

In fact, it barely worked in prime time. Early episodes fared better than most other series on Fox, but still attracted only 4% or 5% of the audience.

Fox stuck with it, however, and in its second season, Moye said, he started to notice that the people who liked the show, “really, really liked it. They would come up to us and start quoting lines. They’d say, ‘My Uncle Ernie sticks his hand in his pants just like Al,’ or ‘My Aunt Lulu dresses just like Peg.’ ”

“In some ways, this has been the significant show in the history of this network,” said Peter Chernin, president of the Fox Entertainment Group. “Not only because of its success, but (also because) it has served to define what this network has wanted to do. Not just in terms of raciness, but that it was willing to deal with a family that was seemingly unlikable, with characters that are not heroic in the traditional TV sense. It has had an enormous amount to do with defining the ethos of this network.”

This season, Peg somehow tricked Al into getting her pregnant. But rather than welcoming a new Bundy bundle of joy into their homes like most sitcom families do, Al, Bud and Kelly have been conducting anti-baby powwows where they scheme to get rid of the infant after it is born by placing it in a basket and sailing it, Moses-style, down the river. (This story line is likely to be dropped soon.)

Such irreverence provoked a one-woman assault on the show in 1989 from Terry Rakolta, a mother of two from a posh Detroit suburb, who wrote to advertisers complaining that the show was “offensive, (filled with) gratuitous sex and very anti-family.” One advertiser pulled out of the series and Rakolta became a media star, appearing on “Nightline” and “Good Morning America” and garnering front-page coverage in the New York Times.

But Rakolta’s attack also unleashed legions of loyal fans, who wrote and called Fox demanding that the network ignore Rakolta. Ratings went up and the controversy went away.

Moye said that part of the reason the attacks have subsided is that “the Terry Rakoltas of the world have realized that if they speak up, it makes these shows really, really popular. And maybe people have loosened up. I mean, ‘Married . . . With Children’ is not any more responsible for the bad things people learn than ‘Murphy Brown’ is responsible for the good.”

Despite the show’s controversial history, Columbia sold the reruns unedited. Thurston said that a few station managers expressed concern about airing the show at hours when children could easily view it, but that did not keep any of them from buying it.

So far, KTTV has not received a single complaint about the 7 p.m. broadcasts, a station spokeswoman said. Nor, Thurston said, is he aware of any complaints about the show’s content anywhere in the country.

Those associated with the show maintain that, compared with such early-evening staples as “Hard Copy” and “A Current Affair,” which thrive on stories of sex and murder, “Married . . . With Children” is quite tame.

“My sense is that this show is pretty well an established part of the TV landscape,” Chernin said. “People understand that it’s all in fun.”

Still, O’Neill bristles at the lack of respect the show has received from the TV industry. In five seasons, it has not earned a single Emmy nomination. And many TV critics, while fawning over such comedies as “Murphy Brown” and “The Simpsons,” dismiss “Married” “as crude and funny on a level that is beneath them,” O’Neill said. “All we can do is thumb our nose at them.”

And count the money.

“In issues of flattery versus finance,” said Gary Lieberthal, chairman of Columbia Television, “I’ll always take finance.”