A Working-class Hero is Something to Be… Except in a Sitcom: Interrogating the Ideological Structures in the US-American Sitcom Married… with Children

Abstract

This article proposes to study the political ambiguities of the working-class family sitcom Married… with Children (Fox, 1986-1997) within the overall context of US-American sitcoms from the 1950s to the late 1990s. After a period dominated by middle-class sitcoms like The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984-1992), the late 1980s saw the return of working-class sitcoms (Roseanne, The Simpsons). Notwithstanding its debt to All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), Married… with Children reduces the family to a prerequisite of the genre and trivializes politics (increasingly so in the 1990s) in favor of economics, suggesting that the family sitcom is middle-class insofar as its formula requires economic and ideological stability. Special attention is paid to the rare moments when Al Bundy is allowed to take on the role of working-class hero, most symbolically in the Labor Day special and season-opener “We’ll Follow the Sun” (S05E01). Bundy’s failure to fully live out the role reflects an evolution of both the character type and the sitcom genre in relation to a Reageanite context characterized by consumerism and narcissism. The revolutionary potential is resorbed as an exception in a satirical sitcom whose politics remain largely implicit and are mainly directed at the ideological foundations of the genre.