So Long, Al ! See Ya, Peg

The creators of “Married . . . With Children” fell in love with the name Al Bundy. But just as they were developing their sitcom a decade ago, Ted Bundy became the most notorious and well-publicized serial killer of his time.

“And all these people were gently suggesting that we might want to change the name of our character, lest people associate him with such a horrible murderer,” said Ron Leavitt, who created the show with his then-partner, Michael Moye. “And Michael said, ‘Don’t worry about it. People will remember Al Bundy long after Ted Bundy is gone and buried.’ I thought he was crazy.”

Leavitt didn’t even think Fox would last, much less the series that was launching its prime-time schedule on April 5, 1987.

“If you would have told me the show would last for 11 [seasons], if you would have told me that Fox would actually succeed, I would have said, ‘OK, and my third wish is that beer and French fries don’t make you fat.’ ”

The genie hasn’t quite come through there, but Moye and Leavitt’s parody of the huggy-wuggy programming that was family comedy back in the Reagan era--the “anti-Cosby,” as they called it--did in fact survive 11 seasons and helped establish Fox as a viable fourth network.

Indeed, some executives have called the series “the most significant show in the history of Fox” because it served to define the bold, racy and contrary ethos of the network long before Fox struck gold with “The Simpsons,” “The X-Files” and the National Football League.

But after tonight, Fox will have to carry on without the show that in many ways has provided its steady, unwavering heartbeat, just as the Baltimore Orioles will some day have to take the field without Cal Ripken. The final original episode features the very thing that got the Bundys into their big miserable mess of a life sentence: a marriage, as daughter Kelly weds an ex-convict.

“This is really very sad for me because it’s a show that I really love,” said Peter Roth, president of Fox Entertainment and the man who ultimately decided to pull the plug. “I love it as a viewer and I love it as a programmer. It is an institution here that helped define, shape and launch this network. But after 11 seasons, its ratings have declined, unfortunately, especially compared to the increasing costs of the show. It’s a business reality that I feel awful about, but this is a series that deserves to be honored and celebrated, and all of us here feel great about it.”

For most of its run, “Married” had aired on Sundays and proved for several years to be Fox’s most popular show. It frequently landed in the Top 20 of all network programs, even when the bulk of Fox’s lineup still languished at the bottom. But this season the network moved it first to Saturdays, then to Mondays, and, as Leavitt said in an interview last week, “we all figured that was the big kiss goodbye.”

*

But not before the bickering, belching Bundys obliterated the idea of what makes a TV family--a depiction that will live on in syndication for years to come.

“People love the naughtiness--that here was a guy, Al Bundy, who said the things about his life, about his wife, that we all sometimes think but can never say out loud,” Leavitt said.

“It was our adolescent rebellion against all those shows where everyone sat together at the dinner table and got along and talked and hugged and solved the world’s problems in 22 minutes. I would go nuts seeing that. That wasn’t my memory of what it was like to eat with my family. And I think for people it just became a guilty pleasure--something that they knew was always going to be nothing but funny.”

The premise was simple. Peg and Al Bundy (played by Katey Sagal and Ed O’Neill) bandy insults and wish out loud that the other would die, but, as the audience knows, they are destined to torture each other as husband and wife forever. Their kids--Kelly, the IQ-challenged sexpot daughter (Christina Applegate), and Bud, the geeky, sexually challenged son (David Faustino), who grew from young teenagers to actual adults over the years without growing up a whit--savage each other ruthlessly. So do Al and his feminist neighbor, Marcy (Amanda Bearse).

Through the years, the producers and actors invoked the names of such television icons as Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker to explain and justify the appeal of Al Bundy and the show. The Bundy clan, they said, was Everyfamily--meager, working-class slobs, full of bluster and schemes, who always get dumped on and trampled in the end.

But Leavitt, who left the show after seven years and now executive produces a similar series, “Unhappily Ever After,” on the WB network, said that what made “Married” special was that no other show could get away with such cartoonish nastiness.

“I’ve never had such fun, such a special feeling as I had working on that show,” he said. “We could do anything. We could shoot the neighbor’s dog in the middle of a bowel movement. We killed Santa Claus.”

They also joked, in every episode, about sex. Whereas the Huxtables of “Cosby Show” fame snuggled up to each other frequently, Al fled from sex-starved Peg almost as deftly as he avoided hugging his son, simultaneously decrying his trampy daughter and fantasizing about the leggy, silicon-sculpted babes who paraded around his shoe store and demented psyche.

It was the vulgarity and cleavage that miffed a Michigan housewife named Terry Rakolta, who in 1989 asked advertisers to boycott the series because it offended her notion of family. The protest landed her on “Nightline” but only served to make the series more popular.

“This was a show that was reviled by a number of people, and it would never have stayed on the air had it not been as popular and as well-crafted as it is,” Roth said. “It was a brilliantly conceived parody that dared to take a shot at the most beloved forms on television. It was funny, painfully honest and it defined the Fox philosophy in that it was distinctive, bold, alternative programming that the viewer cannot get anywhere else. . . .

“Despite any criticism of it, anyone who really knows the show understands that beyond the mean-spiritedness was a reaffirmation of family--even if,” he added, “it was a different kind of family than we are used to seeing.”

* “Married . . . With Children” airs at 9 tonight on Fox (Channel 11). The network has given the episode a rating of TV-14 (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14).