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.

"Unhappily Ever After" is the best trashy sitcom ever to be shown on TV. I mean, how funny are sitcoms nowadays? The humor was just different and the actors didn't take themselves too serious. Mr.Floppy's one of the best characters, where else can you watch a bunny that makes fun of celebrities and politics in almost every episode?

The first two seasons were much better, because.. 1.) Tiffany and Ryan seemed like young kids 2.) The writers just did what they wanted to do. Soon every episode will seem the same. 3.) Jack never got out of the house. 4.) Tiffany's character became perfect in the later seasons, the writers even gave her the best speeches.

This show was about to become really good, but somehow went down the hill. If you are a fan of "Married.. with Children" and "Malcolm in the Middle" you'll definitely like it.

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.

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!

Unhappily ever after is a great show. It may be a ripoff of "Married With Children" but it is a better show. The best character is Mr. Floppy (Jack's alter ego) whose funny jokes and witty comments almost make the show! On scale of one to ten (1=lowest, 10=highest) I give this show 9.7. It's a great show!