Married with Children: The 1994 Northridge Earthquake That Shut Down Our Set

I want to tell you about January 17, 1994, because that night changed how I think about Los Angeles, my family, and the show I was doing every week. We were a few episodes into the back half of Married with Children Season 8. I’d come home from the club at around 2 or 3 in the morning, fell into bed in our Northridge house, and a few minutes later the world came apart. We were sitting right on the epicenter and we had no idea.

A little context first. Before the quake, I was living in Burbank with my mom and dad. My mom had her heart set on a house in Northridge. My dad never wanted to move there. He was happy in Burbank, he was pissed off about leaving, and he said it loud and often. We moved out to Northridge anyway, and we were maybe a year in when the San Andreas reminded us that California had its own opinion about that decision.

The shaking was so brutal we genuinely thought we’d survived The Big One. We were Angelenos. We grew up on earthquake drills. We knew what a real one felt like and this was bigger than anything any of us had been through. We assumed downtown was flat, the freeways were on the ground, the whole city was over. The power was out and our communications were knocked down, so we sat in the dark for a while just trying to figure out if we were the last people in LA. We eventually got into the car and started picking up radio signals, and that’s when the words “Northridge quake” came through.

My dad heard “Northridge” and lost it. He’s blaming my mom in real time, in the car, after we just got through this brutal earthquake. He’s saying the fucking Northridge quake, can you believe it, the one place I didn’t want to live. We were all traumatized and shaky and he’s already running his case file on my mother. Thank God we had earthquake insurance. I’m not joking.

We were supposed to be shooting that week. The Bundys never took time off. Married with Children was always working. But we shut production down for a couple of weeks because the roads were torn up, the cast was wrecked, and nobody had any business pretending to be funny on a soundstage. Half of Hollywood lived in the Valley back then, and a chunk of them got it worse than I did. So the lights stayed off for a beat, and we picked it back up once the city could exhale.

There’s a side story to all of this that I love. David Garrison, who played the original Steve Rhoades, was a New York actor through and through. They had to fly him out to relocate him for the show and he hated Los Angeles. Didn’t want to drive, didn’t want to learn the city, didn’t get the whole LA thing. And he was terrified of earthquakes. Talked about them constantly. The Whittier quake in ’87 spooked him before we even shot the first season. The Northridge quake was the period at the end of his sentence about getting back to New York. He’s barely been back since, except for a few guest spots.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about California. If it isn’t fires, it’s rain. If it isn’t rain, it’s earthquakes. Every place has its something. The South gets hurricanes and tornadoes. We get the ground turning to liquid at three in the morning while my dad blames my mom for the zip code.

We came back to work, we made more episodes, we kept the show running. But anybody who lived through the Northridge quake will tell you it cut a line right through 1994. Before and after. And anytime I drive past the Valley I still think about that night.

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