Married with Children: My Childhood Crush on Alyssa Milano Across the Hallway

Folks, here is a confession that I have not told a whole lot of people. When we shot Married with Children, all the kid actors got pulled out of school and dropped into a little schoolroom on the lot. Christina Applegate and I would sit in there knocking out math problems between scenes, which was already a weird enough way to grow up. But the schoolroom had a feature I was not expecting. Down the hall, in the same building, the cast of Who’s the Boss was doing their own school sessions. That meant Alyssa Milano and Danny Pintauro were ten doors away from me, every single day.

You have to remember the timing on this. Who’s the Boss premiered in 1984. By the time Married with Children showed up in 1987, Tony Danza and Alyssa Milano were already two seasons deep, fully baked, on the cover of every magazine in the supermarket. I was a 13-year-old kid who had been watching that show in my living room before I had any idea I would end up working a hallway away from its leads. I was already a fan. Already had a thing. Already had the mental wallpaper.

Then suddenly that mental wallpaper is walking past the schoolroom door. Alyssa, in real life, doing what you do at a workplace, holding a script, talking to her tutor, getting a coffee. Not a poster, not a TV screen, an actual human person who I now had to share a building with.

So you know that word, tongue-tied. You hear it growing up, you nod, you act like you know what it means. I had no idea what it actually meant until Alyssa Milano walked past the schoolroom door for the first time. Suddenly my mouth stopped working. Words I had been using my entire life turned into a noise. I would try to say something normal like “hey” and what came out was closer to “huh.” I was supposed to be a working actor, paid to talk on camera. Could not get a coherent sentence out for the woman walking by my school desk.

And this is the part I want everyone clear on. I had a crush. She did not. There was no chemistry. There was no slow-burn maybe-something. There was a 13-year-old kid getting briefly paralyzed by his own brain chemistry while a 14-year-old TV star walked by, completely unaware. It was, to use the word I could not find in the moment on the watch party, unrequited. Vicious and unrequited. The poetry version of getting absolutely no signal back.

Looking back at it now, I think most people who grew up on TV have a story like this one. You spend your formative years on a set, the studio is your school, the cast next door is your celebrity neighborhood. You are simultaneously a kid actor who handles million-dollar lighting cues and a kid who can not say hello to the girl in the next building. Both things are true at the same time, and nobody warns you about either one.

The Married with Children years gave me about a thousand of these little moments. Most of them never made it into an episode and never got told outside of a green room. That is exactly why I started running the Bundy Club watch parties in the first place. The fans deserve the stuff that did not make the cut.

This one fell out of me on the very first Bundy Breakdown Zoom watch party with co-executive producer and Married with Children writer Richard Gurman. If you want to hear the whole conversation, including Richard sitting there listening to me try to remember the word unrequited in real time, the full recording is up on that recap.

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. Join up at bundyclub.com/join and stop watching from the outside.