One of the cornerstones of the then-nascent FOX network in the 1980s, Married...with Children certainly wasn't everybody's cup of tea. But the sitcom -- whose earliest episodes drew comparisons to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- had a acrid, raucous, and thoroughly unsentimental take on family life that felt far more acidic than anything we had previously seen on TV. With next week's release of Married...with Children: The Complete Series (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment), it's worth reflecting on other sitcoms that challenged the norms of TV and, for better or worse, expanded the boundaries of what you could get away with doing.
All in the Family and Maude: While these Norman Lear shows featured characters who were opposite sides of the same coin -- Family's Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) was an outspoken reactionary, while his wife's cousin Maude Findlay (Bea Arthur) was stridently liberal -- it wasn't just the politics that made them controversial for the early '70s. From the audible toilet flushes on All in the Family to Maude's decision to have an abortion, both shows constantly went where their forebears never would have dared.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Actress Moore and her husband Grant Tinker, the prime movers behind what many consider to be the greatest sitcom ever, had many battles with CBS over allowing the character of Mary Richards to be a single woman, on her own in the big city. (The network wanted her to be a widow, fearing that if she was divorced, audiences would think Mary had divorced Rob Petrie, Moore's husband on The Dick Van Dyke Show.) MTM would later make casual suggestions that Mary was on the pill and not necessarily averse to occasionally sleeping with some of the many male dates she had over the course of the show's run.
Roseanne: I still remember working at a newspaper in the fall of 1988, when this blue-collar sitcom based on its star's stand-up routines, premiered on ABC. The paper's TV critic was astounded that Roseanne, playing a mother of three, would make a joke about how some animals eat their young. So while the culture and mainstream humor have caught up with this revolutionary show, it was totally a big deal at the time.
In Living Color: This sketch comedy show brought an in-your-face style of street humor to the airwaves that really hadn't been seen on major networks before. (Richard Pryor's 1977 NBC show was famously censored within an inch of its life before its quick cancellation.) Hearing suburban white kids say "Homie don't play that" and "Two snaps up" went hand-in-hand with mainstream youth culture's embrace of hip-hop.
Will & Grace: While gay audiences often lost patience with this show's coyness and timidity, Will & Grace nonetheless represents a watershed moment for queer representation in popular culture. Unlike Ellen, whose lead character (and star) didn't come out until after already establishing a high level of audience good will, this was a show that came out of the gate with two lead characters who were openly and unapologetically gay. And while Will & Grace represents an early step on a long road that TV is still traveling, it was still leaps and bounds past anything that preceded it.