When did Married with Children go downhill?

You didn't like the episode with the breast feeding protest, OP?

Divine as Uncle Otto who was supposed to join the cast, who then died. He probably would have been great on the show as a regular.

The adoption of the child "Seven" was when I bailed.

When Marcie was no longer described as born again Christian.

What was the "No Ma'am" subplot?

I didn't watch the last few seasons because I went off to college. But "Seven" is about when I stopped.

J'Adore fat jokes

When Al quit showing his barefeets.

Ted McGinley

Although there were many classic episodes from seasons 6-11, the show hit a major bump with the addition of Seven, which sadly tried to erase the viewers knowlege of Peggy's pregnancy and Katy Segal's real life miscarriage. I liked Jefferson and felt he was a good addition when Steve left, even though I loved the Steve character and most of my favorite episodes were during the Steve Years. Ted had good chemistry with ed O'Neil and his banter with Marcy was funny. He was a much different character than Steve which in turned helped the Marcy character evolve.

The show officially went to Shit after Kelly's haircut and Buck's death.

My favorite TV show ever "kiss the chef, kill the wife!"

No Ma'am was actually funny

When Bud became the Brian ( Family Guy) of the show.

It just got old, as sitcoms tend to do when they become successful. The last season was the worst: Columbia brought in a whole new writing/producing staff, replacing all the people who had been there since the Embassy days when Norman Lear, who was out of the picture entirely by the time MwC began and Coca-Cola reduced the company to an in-credit copyright holding company called ELP Communications in 1987, was still in charge. Then Fox made things worse by moving it to three different time slots, two on different nights.

I started watching when they moved [italic]The Simpsons[/italic] back to Sunday night (there's a case for imposing a maximum running time on a show if ever there was one) and I held out up to that point. But I could see the show was in its death throes. It survived Seven (he was cute, just all wrong for the show), but this was too much for them. When Fox ultimately did pull the plug, Ed O'Neill had to hear about it from fans who heard it over the radio.

R8 Around the time Ted Mcginley came on, it became a farce, and and enjoyable one. Before that it was a very subversive show and a product of and riposte to Reagans America.

I do think Peg and Marcy's pregnancies and later Seven's addition to the show is when officially began to die. Babies and kids don't fit in MWC's crude and dark humor. Bud and Kelly were in their early teens when the show started and were never written to be sweet and innocent like Seven was. A third child would have ruined the sibling dynamic. The show also got more and more cartoonish and bizarre and they began running out of ideas. Jefferson though was a great addition as the male counterpart to Peggy. I'd like to think that Marcy just got more angry and shrill due to living next door to the Bundys for years and Steve leaving her was the tipping point.

Ron Leavitt left MWC and went on to create Unhappily Ever After which also went from being black comedy about working class family to a live-action cartoon though that happened quickly. He even said he didn't intend to make a MWC clone but it ended up that way anyway because it was what people wanted.

I didn’t quit watching it until the last season. Fox obviously wanted it gone if they kept moving its timeslot around, and new writers who weren’t as good as the old ones took over.

At least they could let go. It still sucks that the cast members were the last ones to know they were canceled. Now [italic]Family Guy[/italic] has occupied its old Sunday night time slot for even longer and just won’t quit.

The day it premiered.

No, R17, that’s when [italic]Who’s the Boss[/italic] jumped the shark and gave it both AIDS and COVID.

Actually, I take it back: that show was so bad it jumped the shark the day [italic]Taxi[/italic] premiered. I can’t believe it had the same production company as MwC.

I will take the worst of MwC over that vile trainwreck. If anything, that show it was a perfect example of why we wanted and needed alternatives to the big three networks. The Bundys at their most cartoonish were still more believable than the idea that Judith Lightweight would ever want to have anything to do with a blithering idiot and ethnic stereotype like Tony Danza or that he didn’t molest either of those two untalented little brats and get the girl pregnant.