Behind the Scenes of Married… with Children: The Bundy Club Documentary Is Here

Hey Bundy Club fam. We made a documentary. Well, a short one, but it is ours. “Behind the Scenes of Married… with Children” is about 28 minutes of the best moments from our live Bundy Breakdown Zoom nights, cut together into one story about how the show was made, who made it, and why it still matters to so many of you. Ed O’Neill is in it. Amanda Bearse is in it. David Garrison, Richard Gurman, Pauly Shore, Harold Sylvester, Darren Blatt and me are in it. And so are a bunch of you, because some of the best questions in the whole thing came from members on the couch.

The tagline on the video says “The story can finally be told…” and honestly, that is how it felt putting it together. These are not press junket answers. These are the people who lived it, talking to the people who watched it. Here is the full rundown of what is in there, in the order you will see it.

Al Bundy Was Never the Bully

The documentary opens with Richard Gurman, our co-executive producer and writer, asking Ed a question I had never heard anybody ask him: after all those episodes, is there anything about the character he wishes he had done differently? Ed did not even hesitate. “I couldn’t possibly imagine doing anything other than what I did.” Then he thought about it some more and said he never questioned what he was doing. “It just seemed natural.”

Where Ed went next is the reason this is the first scene. He gave the credit to Ron Leavitt and Michael Moye, and said their creation of these characters was “so smart.” Bundy was not political. He was not racist. He was just that guy who was always on the wrong end of things. Ed said he cannot count how many Black fans would come up to him and tell him they loved the show, and when he had time to talk, he would tell them that half of it was created by a Black guy. They never knew. Ed called it “so very subtle,” and he is right. Michael Moye’s fingerprints are all over that show, and a lot of people still do not know it.

Then Ed brought up the shoe store. Al insulted a lot of customers, often overweight women, but Ed pointed out that it could never be Al who started the fight. It was always Al getting picked on and firing back, almost like self defense. Richard Gurman had the writers’ room phrase for it ready to go: “punching up, not punching down.” You hit back at somebody who hit you first. You do not just walk up and knock someone down. As outrageous as Al was, Richard Gurman said, he never did that. If you ever wondered why you could laugh at Al without feeling gross about it, there is your answer, straight from the guy who wrote it and the guy who played it.

Bearse, Like Curse

Next up, Darren gives it up for “the woman in the middle of the couch,” Amanda Bearse. And because it is Amanda, the very first thing she does is fix the pronunciation of her last name. It rhymes with curse. “I will curse you.” She also had a great point about it: if people do not know how to say your name, they just do not say it.

I jumped in right after that, because it gave me the chance to say something I mean every time I say it. Married with Children was the greatest set in the world to work on. From Ron and Michael to Richard Gurman and all the writers and producers to the cast, it was wonderful. I have been on sets where it is tense, and after a set like ours, walking onto one of those is just a horrible feeling. David Garrison agreed and took it one step further. A tense set does not just feel bad, it does not produce good work. When actors are “all jammed up in their heads,” you do not get good work. He said that was never the case on our show, at least in the years he was there.

Steve Rhoades, Chardonnay and the Real Al Bundy

When David Garrison was asked what he brought to Steve, he chose his words carefully and landed on something perfect. An “East Coast Chardonnay sipping” yuppie. A woke man before woke was even an idea. Anybody who watched Steve stand in the Bundy kitchen looking personally offended by the furniture knows exactly what he meant.

That led to a point I have made before and will keep making. A lot of people do not know this, but Ron Leavitt was kind of the real Al Bundy. All those Al-isms were mostly Ron-isms. People talk about the bathroom humor and the edge, but Ron and Michael set the tone for all of it. And here is the part people do not expect: they were incredibly generous guys with their time and their caring. You would not think it from some of the stuff they wrote, but that is who they were.

Then Darren called on Wade, one of our members, who did not even have a question. He just wanted to say thank you to Amanda for being the perfect foil to Al. His words: without Marcy, Al does not work. Amanda’s answer was pure class. “Well, thank you. That’s a lovely thing to say.”

Inside the Writers’ Room

This is one of my favorite stretches of the whole thing, because Richard Gurman walks you through exactly how an episode got written. You get dismissed from the writing room for about a week, a week and a half, and you go write your full draft. Then you bring it back in, everybody has a copy in front of them, and the rewriting starts. Line by line. Notes like this scene is too long, Ed does not come in quick enough, this joke is not good enough, we have done this joke too many times, here is a better joke for here. You go through every single line until it is done, and then it gets sent out to the departments, wardrobe and so on. And by then you are already working on the next script. As Richard Gurman put it, you are never not working.

Darren asked whether the creators would hand off a fully baked idea, using the episode with the hawk and the rare egg as an example, and let the writers fill in the blanks. Richard Gurman said no. It was free fall. Ideas flying around the room, with Ron and Michael running it. If something stuck, they held on to it and developed it with the group to see if it had legs. A one liner might make everybody laugh hysterically and feel like it captured the show, but the real questions were whether it fleshed out and whether it gave all the characters a moment. That work happened in the room with the two executives, Michael Moye and Ron Leavitt, and the rest of the staff pitching jokes, and some of them were strong on structure too. Richard Gurman called it “a group activity,” which is a nice way of describing a room full of very funny people arguing for a living.

A River Trip With Al and Marcy

Darren then brought in Tony, who he welcomed like a first time caller, and David Garrison, before anything else, complimented the guitars on the wall. Tony had just watched the David Garrison comeback episodes and called out Get the Dodge Out of Hell as phenomenal, then asked David for a poignant memory with Ed O’Neill.

David’s favorite moment in the entire series was on the couch in The Razor’s Edge, when Al shows the picture of his mother-in-law. But his all time favorite memory was not on the set at all. He took Ed and Amanda on a river trip on the Dolores River in southwest Colorado and camped out with them overnight. “Talk about a fish out of water.” He said it was probably his favorite moment of all, “which no one else got to see but me.”

He also said something about the show that really stuck with me. There was a sense of continuity that went all the way back to the pilot, and it held even in the later years when he came back as a guest. The world was outlandish, a cartoon, but it had something real about it. As dysfunctional as the Bundys were, those of us making the show were a family, and there was a real sense of ease about it. Coming back, he said, “just felt like, you know, putting on that old shirt again.”

Pauly Shore and the Hottest Show on the Air

Then Pauly Shore shows up in his red bandana, and you get a little taste of his episode, Season 3, Episode 14, “A Three Job, No Income Family,” where he played the Captain at the burger joint and made Al’s life miserable. Pauly said that when he got the audition we were one of the hottest shows on the air, and he was nervous. This was before MTV took off for him. He was just a guy going out on auditions his manager and agent sent him on, and booking our show was a big deal.

I told him we had decided to bring the guests in first so we did not have a whole messy scramble of people trying to get on, and then we tried to figure out how far back we go. I said we started in ’87, so he came in mid season three. Neither of us thinks we knew each other before. Pauly figures we met on the show. He talked about how Hollywood had a kind of innocence back then, everybody just excited to get an audition, and he said that for him, and for America, our show was the ’90s version of All in the Family. “Hands down” the best written show with the best characters. I will take that all day.

Another guest followed with a story about Katey, calling her the coolest lady in the world, and then added: “I would love to say and then I quit drinking, but I drank for another decade or so.” His point was that every memory he has of being on Married with Children is a good one. I told him I remember them sitting on the couch between takes, talking about tequila. Some memories just stay with you.

Al and Bud Find Their Voices

Ed talked about how the Bundy character drifted away from the pilot, which was a lot more realistic, and became kind of cartoonish over time. His take: it worked. I mentioned that he had a thicker accent in that first episode, and Ed explained that it was more of a sound at the start. Then he said the part I love. I was growing up during that change, and I started to mimic him, so I sounded like his son. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what a kid does. Ed said it worked great, and I am going to choose to take that as a compliment to twelve year old me.

When the Room Changed

Darren put a question to Richard Gurman about something I have said on our show before: that around seasons 8 through 11 things got a little more cartoony, and that the writers kind of ran out of material. Richard Gurman did not dodge it. He said that will certainly happen. Some of the cartooniness was brilliant and wonderful, and some of it was more like, okay, we have seen this before.

But he pointed to something that happened a couple of seasons earlier. When David Garrison left, the show lost its grounding. Steve was the polar opposite of Al. They argued, they fought, and you understood where both of them were coming from. Without David, Richard Gurman said, it was almost like Martians. I told him that was a really good point. A great point, actually.

How Much Was Scripted?

This is the question we get more than almost any other, so here is the answer on the record. I would say 95 percent of what we said, if not more, was on the page. During rehearsal, when the writers were not around, we would sometimes find little things that cracked us up, and if the writers loved them, they went into the script. Beyond that, it was looks and moments that happened while we were actually shooting in front of the audience, when the energy takes over and you wonder where that came from. But 95 percent of everything we said was written by those guys. Great actors, great writers, and that team just clicked.

Richard Gurman said the writers respected that we stuck to the script. When they came down to watch rehearsals, if something was funny, whether it came from an actor or a cameraman, all they cared about was making it funnier. Sometimes they would change things at the very last minute, right in the middle of shooting, when an idea hit a producer or a writer. He asked me what it was like to suddenly get a new joke.

Honestly, the person I always felt for in the memorization department was Ed. He had monologues that ran two pages, sometimes two and a half. That is a lot. And if you take out a sentence or change a word in the middle of a speech like that, it can really mess with your brain. Ed had his work cut out for him on that show.

Selling the Gag

A member in a Polk High shirt had a question for Ed about one of the all time great sight gags: Al pulling Kelly’s boyfriends off the couch and throwing them into the wall. Did any of those actors ever feel like Ed took it too far? Ed said no. Those guys really sold the stunt. The trick was that the actor kicked the bottom of the door right when you thought his head was hitting it. Ed’s job was simple: “made sure I didn’t ram his actual head into the door. That was all I had to do.”

The Live Audience

Darren talked about reading the fun facts content on our site and how it was always a live audience, never a laugh track, and how the crowds got really rowdy as the seasons went on. What was that like? Richard Gurman called it a mixed reaction. On one hand, the true test of your material is a live audience, and there is nothing like it. The flip side came up too: if you are searching for a line and cannot find the rhythm, it gets in your head, and now you are in your head in front of a whole studio full of people.

That brought up the later years. I remember one night clearly, sitting off near the audience, when Ed was on one of those two page speeches and kept going up in the same spot, take after take. This was around the ninth or tenth season. Ed’s answer was so honest. “Some days, man. It doesn’t come to you.” He also said it was nobody’s fault. You cannot do eleven seasons and expect writers in the ninth or tenth year to keep doing great stuff without repeating themselves. They were trying to do the best they could.

Lightning in a Bottle

Harold Sylvester, our Griff, said something that I think every fan should hear. Most people, even people who love the show, do not know how good that cast was as actors. He called the principal cast brilliant. I agreed, and I gave the credit where it belongs: to the casting directors, Marc Hirschfeld and Tammy Billik, and to the producers for choosing us. Sometimes you get lightning in a bottle.

Traci Lords, who guest starred on our show as T.C. in Tooth or Consequences and as Vanessa Van Pelt in Al Bundy, Shoe Dick, brought a fun comparison. She also played Stacy Flagler on Roseanne and remembered being on three or four episodes over there, but she said she felt more of a connection to Married with Children, because of her relationship with Christina and the camaraderie on our set.

If It Ain’t on the Page, It Ain’t on the Stage

Tony came back with a shout out to a specific shot: Steve jumping into bed with Jefferson and Marcy, then the cut to Steve quivering, holding the egg in the Bundys’ house. Tony was surprised NBC was not scrambling to grab Ron and the writers for Saturday Night Live, and he told David he was on cue with every shot.

David was gracious about it and handed the credit straight back to the writers. The hardest thing an actor can do is try to make bad material shine. His line: “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.” He also explained something a lot of fans do not know. We often made changes between an afternoon show and an evening show, because what aired was an edited version of two different tapings in front of two different live audiences. If a joke was not landing, the writers were right there to fix it. He even remembered one episode that turned into two episodes because it ran so long they could not cut it down to the roughly 22 minutes they had before commercials. If the writing is not there, he said, the acting cannot possibly be there.

Steve and Al

A member asked David how the chemistry between him and Ed compared to what came later with Ted McGinley as Jefferson. David said that he and Ed got along very well from day one and liked to hit the ball back and forth. He ran through some favorites: the balding episode, where Al takes the pot while they are playing poker in the back of the bank, the Barbie doll episode, and the Mustang episode, when they went on location and shot together. Ed had also come out of the theater, so they spoke the same language.

The same member said he always thought David’s episodes were more grounded, and that the tension between Steve and Al made them funnier and more relatable. I added that I think the show in general was pretty grounded for the first four seasons, and then it became something different.

Tap Shoes and Broadway

Another member asked David what he missed most about the stage while he was doing our show. He said there were a lot of questions in that question, and started with the tap dancing. Ron and Michael never got tired of yanking his chain about coming from Broadway, so making him tap dance on their show was their way of getting back at him a little. What he really missed was the immediacy. Take the audience in a TV studio, multiply it by about ten, and that is a Broadway house. You get that much more energy coming back at you.

From the Bottom of the Ratings to a Freight Train

A member in a black cap asked whether any of us imagined, back then, that people would still love the show this many years later. I do not think anybody can imagine that. Tom McCleister, our Ike, said he did not even know if he would still be alive after all those years. Then Ed Bell, Bob Rooney himself, remembered asking Katey a question in his first week or two on the show, and she told him they started out thinking it was just this “bent little show” that might last a season or two. Then it took off, and then it was a freight train.

I told my mall story, the short version. I had been working my whole life in guest roles and short lived series, and at twelve years old I just wanted somebody to recognize me. So after about a season, I wore a Married with Children shirt to the mall. Not one person said a thing. In those first few seasons we were down at the bottom of the ratings. We used to check the Nielsen ratings in TV Guide, and when we finally hit the top 10, and then number one a couple of times, it was shocking. Mind blowing, really, because Fox was not even in every market yet.

Married with Children Was Huge in Jail

This is one of my favorite pieces of Bundy trivia. For a stretch of years, the two most popular shows in prison were Cops at number one and Married with Children right behind it. That popularity followed me around in real life. In the documentary I tell part of a story about guys who, as I put it, “just couldn’t rob the Bud Bundy character that they, you know, that they watched every Sunday.” Thank God it worked out well for me. I cannot tell you how many times I got out of tickets because of Married with Children. I once had to send a guy an autographed picture, and a friend of mine got out of being arrested for possession. That show was huge in the hood.

Dan Tullis Jr., our Officer Dan, added a thought about playing it straight that I love. They tried to make it as real as they could, because real is actually funny in the right situation. Richard Gurman finished the thought: the seriousness of it made it funnier than anything about who they were.

And a member brought up an episode he called really funny and one of the few that tied all the plots together, and David Garrison said it was a lot of fun to do that episode, “get carried away and get silly.”

No Planned Finale

I am not going to sugarcoat this part, because I do not in the video either. We spent eleven years on that show. We got paid well. We had fun. It was a great job, and God bless Fox, I love them, they gave me a great job. But for them not to make the decision ahead of time and tell the writers, so the fans who gave eleven years of their lives to this show could get a real ending, is something I still feel strongly about. They billed it as the final episode and basically assumed the audience was not smart enough to notice. It is disappointing for the fans, and I really wish they had done it differently. I really do.

A Nasty Pack With a Heart

The last word goes to the family. Going back through these episodes, what struck me was how vicious the Bundys really were just to get what they wanted. I was thinking about 976-SHOE, and The Razor’s Edge too. We were a nasty pack. David Garrison put the bow on it. What made it work was that way, way down deep there was always a sense of family. If push came to shove, they really would step up for each other.

Pull Up a Seat on the Couch

The documentary closes the way these nights always do: the stories do not end here. Every other Thursday at 6 PM Pacific, 9 PM Eastern, Bundy Club members go live with me and special guests from the world of Married with Children, including past cast members, directors, writers, a producer, and celebrities who appeared on the series. This is not an ordinary podcast. Members can be part of the show, sit with us on the virtual couch, ask questions, share stories, and go even deeper behind the scenes. A lot of the best moments in this documentary came from you.

Huge thanks to Ed O’Neill, Amanda Bearse, David Garrison, Richard Gurman, Pauly Shore, Harold Sylvester, Dan Tullis Jr., Tom McCleister, Ed Bell, Traci Lords, and every guest and member who showed up on these nights. Executive produced by Darren Blatt and me, with Brian Messenlehner as technical producer, who keeps the whole circus running. See you on the couch.