One of our members actually sat in the Sunset Gower audience watching us tape episodes back in the run. He came on the latest watch party with Richard Gurman, raised his hand, and asked two of the questions I get asked the most. The first one is the spinoff that almost happened. The second is the episode Fox would not let air. Two of the all-time greatest “wait, what really happened?” Bundy questions in the same breath. Here are both stories, straight from the people in the room when each thing went down.
The spinoff that got killed by a legal landmine
For the record, the Next Gen Bundy idea was not a rumor. It was real. Sony came on board. Michael Moy was behind it. Every single cast member had given the verbal commitment to come back as recurring characters around the new kids. That is not a tiny ask. Getting Ed, Katie, Amanda, and the rest to all sign on for a recurring presence on a spinoff is the kind of thing that should mean the spinoff is happening.
What killed it was not us. It was somebody outside the cast who I am not going to name here, who has a legal position that has stymied us at every single angle. Every time we try to move forward, it comes back to the same legal hurdle. It is genuinely frustrating because it would have been a really fun show. If at some point we find another iteration, or there is another world where that hurdle clears, I will be the first one to tell you. For now, it is just stuck. So whenever you hear the spinoff is dead, it is not dead exactly. It is parked. With a wheel boot on it.
The banned motel episode, as told by the man who wrote on the show
Now the second question. Richard Gurman took this one because he was in the writers’ room when it happened. The setup is this. We were right in the middle of the Terry Rakolta heat. Sponsors were pulling out, the network was sweating, and the show was somehow getting bigger by the week because of all the attention. And inside that exact pressure cooker, the writers shipped a script where Al and Peggy go to a motel at Steve and Marcy’s suggestion.
Here is the plot. The hotel has been secretly taping the rooms. Steve and Marcy get there first, see themselves on the in-room TV (which is hilarious all by itself), laugh their asses off, then go ahead and have sex anyway. Then they tell Al and Peg they should come down and check out the place. Al and Peg do the same thing, not knowing about the cameras. Later it all comes out, they realize the whole hotel is on tape, and they all go to court.
This is where the punchline lands. The judge plays back the tapes. Steve and Marcy’s tape is, per Richard’s words, about two hours long. Sex clearly happened. Big award for invasion of privacy. Then they roll Al and Peg’s tape. It is so short the judge cannot establish that sex actually occurred. No award. That is the joke at the center of the whole episode, and it is also exactly the kind of thing Fox was not in the mood for in the middle of the Rakolta firestorm. They yanked it from the original run. Never reran it. The only reason any of us can watch it today is because they finally put it back in when they struck the series DVDs at the very end of the run. Now it lives in the streaming reruns too.
Richard’s read on it, which I love, is that the episode was racy but probably not racier than half of what we did. It just landed at the worst possible moment for the network. If it had aired a year earlier or a year later, it would have been a normal Tuesday on Fox. Timing.
Want to hear the whole conversation with Richard, the fan’s full question, and a couple hours of other writers’ room stories? Catch the full Richard Gurman watch party here.
Not a Bundy Club member yet? Get in here. The free tier gives you a peek at the community, and the paid tiers put you on the couch with us for the watch parties where stories like this one come out (and where the fan who asked these two questions was sitting next to me when he asked them). Join up at bundyclub.com/join and stop watching from the outside.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.