Unhappily Ever After

Unhappily Ever After is in syndication where I live, and watching it these days, it's clear that while it based itself on Married...With Children, it was also trying to be innovative in how it told its story, how its actors interrelated, and how it treated the show itself.

Obstensibly, the show was about a family of five: a divorced couple, a sexpot daughter, one idiot kid, and one not-so-much an idiot kid. The show however also tended to treat the fourth wall as their urinal, frequently breaking out of character to be themselves, talking to the audience, bringing in studio executives, etc.

This was one of the good points of the show: in one episode, Nikki Cox and Kevin Connolly are faced with having to get rid of the actor who plays Ryan, because he wasn't written into the script and refuses to go away.

The cheesecake factor here is high -- but the cheesecake remembers to laugh at itself quite frequently. The acting for the most part is wooden on Nikki's part, but the actor who plays Jack manages to get the Al Bundy down without all those annoying characteristics Ed O'Neill slowly added to the role.

It's a stupid show, but it's supposed to be stupid, and there are some genuinely funny, and occasionally vicious moments in the show.

It's true that the show is an obvious Married With Children ripoff. In fact, in one episode I specifically remember Ed O'Neill's (Al Bundy from Married With Children) name being mentioned. Nevertheless, the show is hilarious. Especially Mr Floppy.

Frankly Unhappily Ever After can be considered a guilty pleasure. The show esstentially played out on a trashy level (i.e. in terms of its seemingly inane storytelling) and perhaps the acting had a tendecy of being relatively amateurish. Unhappily Ever After tried to coast as far as it could in terms of references to popular culture and to a certain degree the show benefited from it. Perhaps that was the only thing the show had to fall back on but the references managed to come out on a frequent basis and were fairly interesting never the less. Perhaps Unhappily Ever After can considerably be labled as "low-rent satire." You're viewing something that's can be juvenile on a frequent basis but at the same time will make a fun out of numerous things in popular culture.

I loved this show. It was kind of a takeoff of Married with Children, but it struck me as a smarter version of said show. As Al Bundy's life was complicated in a simple way, Jack Malloy's was complicated in a complicated way. Bundy was just a man's idiot living a very cynical life, but Jack was a raging alcoholic suffering from Schizophrenia embodied in a child's toy. The intelligence of the children was reversed (the hot girl was smart and the boy was the stupid one). While the episodes about the kids were semi-funny, Jack was indeed the key character, and when the story revolved around him, the show tended to be hilarious. Sure, Tiffany's competition with her schoolmate came off as funny, especially because she took her world a little too seriously, but finding out that Jack was the founding member of the band that eventually became Aerosmith was hilarious.

This show NEEDS to come out on DVD. It would be the first set I'd buy. Someone petition the WB for episodes!

I'll admit, when I first started watching this show in 1995, I thought that this would be the new MWC once the old MWC went off the air. I mean, look at the similarities......the deadbeat, minimum-wage earning father; the wise-cracking, undersexed mother; a son who dreams of scoring but never does, and a totally hot daughter. There's a few differences, however:

1. The hot daughter is smarter than the boys. She's the straight-A student here. Of course, that doesn't stop her from wiggling around in the shortest skirts possible.

2. There's 2 sons. One combines the undersexed part of MWC's "Bud" character and the dumb part of MWC's "Kelly" character, the other is used primarily for comic relief.

3. Mr. Floppy. The talking bunny is Mr. Malloy's alter ego, and only he can talk to him. Of course, his family thinks he's crazy when he spends all that time in the basement.

4. Tiffany, the hot, short-skirted daughter, is a virgin. When I first heard this, I thought it was the biggest contradiction of the show. Here's a girl that looks this good, with all these guys drooling over her, and she's a VIRGIN? Oh please. As we all know, Kelly Bundy of MWC's favorite spot was the back seat of a car. We didn't see it on camera, but she was understood to be very promiscuous.

After the behind-the-scenes people seen who was watching the show, and who on the show they were watching, first the grandma was let go (after the first season!) and then Stephanie Hodge (who played the mother) was booted off the show. "Unhappily" was restructured around Nikki Cox's character, Tiffany. The show then became an exercise in watching Tiffany and her best friend glide across the screen in the shortest, skimpiest dresses allowed on TV-14 television. I thoroughly enjoyed watching this show, and when it went off the air I was pretty disappointed. The reruns are still around, and I really like watching those! I give this show a solid A.