Unhappily Ever After

I have watched a few episodes of this show on late night syndication, and I found myself in the odd position of being intrigued and disappointed at the same time.

The show revolves around the type of family that inhabited pre-"Ally McBeal" Fox Channel shows. We have the stereotypical wife who loves to shop and think illogically. We have the son who can only rely on his hand to console him. We have the daughter who inspires the laugh track to go nuts with wolf whistles just by stepping out onto the stage.

When these characters are around, the show has two modes: predictable and offensive. We see that the son is going to get slapped in the face by the popular girl at school, and we wonder where the humor is in him accidentally killing the mailman (who we find out later is his actual father).

The show takes a slightly more interesting turn, though, in its central character. The father. In other shows, the father has been the most logical figure of the household. He is the one that holds the insanity together. In "Unhappily Ever After", however, the twist is that the father is the crazy one. A couple of times each episode, he sits down on the couch and gets half-assed advice from Mr. Floppy, a hallucination of a stuffed bunny that he had in his childhood.

This part of the show is where I get intrigued. This is an interesting and original idea, with numerous possibilities. Unfortunately, the writers don't know what to do with it, and consequently let the idea become the joke. Mr. Floppy (who is given life thanks to voice-over king Bobcat Goldthwait) has no other purpose in the show than to tell crude jokes and brag about his charm.

It is a shame to see such an idea go to waste. "Unhappily Ever After" had the potential to be one of the most original comedies of the 90's, and instead turned into a cheap and predictable retread of the "Married With Children" formula.

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!

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.

At first glance, this show would appear to be nothing more than a cheap "Married with Children" rip-off, and to be honest, that's not entirely untrue. Yes, the characters and situations are basically the same as "Married": The pathetic working-class Dad; the hormone-enraged loser son; the not-too-bright sexpot daughter; the horrid living conditions...but there are enough differences in this show to make it enjoyable in it's own right. First off, there's Floppy, the stuffed bunny who's the father's imaginary friend (conjured up in the first show to help him overcome a nervous breakdown, I think), played by Bobcat Goldthwait. Since Floppy is only in the father's imagination, of course nobody is aware of his existence but the dad, and the conversations they have about what's going on are some of the funniest in the show. Then there are what could be called, "surface" changes, little things that differentiate it from "Married": There being two sons instead of only one; the daughter being smarter than the boys, them having two sexy female teen leads (the daughter and her rival) instead of just one, and of course, Floppy. This show is obviously derived from Married with Children (and they've acknowledged it at least once with an on-camera Ed O'Neill reference), but it's different enough from the original that it's actually quite funny on it's own --to me, VERY funny. When "Married" was still on the air I watched both of these shows; after "Married" got canceled I looked forward to "Unhappily" even more. Watching this show and comparing it to "Married" can be kind of like when you want a Coke but the machine only has Pepsi, you'll go with the Pepsi because they're essentially the same...and in fact, some days you *want* a different cola drink. If you haven't given this show a chance because it looks like a cheapo knock-off of "Married", you should reconsider. I was saddened when this show got canned, it was one of the few WB programs I actually watched. This show had a lot of the same things that made "Married" such a great show, plus a few surprises. Try to catch the reruns on WB before they pull them off completely.

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.