Scent of a Woman

The Series

Ah yes, Married with Children, that flagship and signature series of the young Fox network. The series that branded the young network as the one that will, indeed, air anything as long as it’s cheap, obvious, and vulgar enough to elicit peals of laughter from only the simplest people in the world.

Now, before you get all huffy and smite me a snob for getting all elitist and branding MWC as a “white trash TV show,” consider this:

Married with Children is a sitcom that used to get HUGE rolls of laughter from the studio audience — every time they heard a toilet flush. The sound of a flushing toilet became MWC’s signature running gag. I don’t really think one has to elaborate on that in order to indicate the level of humor we’re dealing with here. Married with Children is gross, stupid, and entirely obvious in every conceivable way that a sitcom can be those things, only toss in an extra-large portion of smug, sniggering raunchiness and the stew’s nearly complete. This is a pretty terrible TV show.

Which means that, obviously, I really loved the thing. For at least the first season and some of the second, anyway. But once I realized that the producers were never planning to forge any new ground, aside from perhaps a few creative new fart jokes or crotch references, I had to forsake my admiration for leading dad Ed O’Neill and shut the door on Married with Children. Not even the gradually more alluring presence of Christina Applegate could wash the nasty taste out of my mouth when the Bundy clan showed up on my TV screen.

Not even remotely surprisingly, Married with Children was a huge success for Fox … and to this day one suspects they’re still trying to erase the stink of the series from their hallways. If Fox presently has the reputation as a low-class outfit, and they really did for the longest time, it’s because THIS was the main course they offered for so long. (How MWC and The Simpsons co-habitated for so long I have no idea. It’s like putting a McDonald’s right next to the Four Seasons.)

But save your emails, Bundyfans, because I’d certainly never begrudge you your guilty little pleasures. At the very least, MWC’s fourth season represents a collection of episodes that were somewhat grounded in reality. (Watch a marathon of eighth or ninth season episodes and you’ll get a glimpse of my own personal hell.) The show’s strongest asset (by about 14,000 kilometers) was Ed O’Neill as the hapless patriarch Al Bundy, and he gets to do some solid work here, albeit on a fairly intermittent basis.

Married With Children’s fourth season comes home on DVD in fairly standard (and inexpensive) style, which should be more than adequate for the hardcore fans. You’ll get all 23 of season four’s episodes, in their original broadcast form, albeit with no sort of bells and whistles to speak of. Plus, I’m told that several of the episodes included are the syndication versions, and that’s pretty lame.

Episode List

Hot Off the Grill
Dead Men Don’t Do Aerobics
Buck Saves the Day
Tooth or Consequences
He Ain’t Much, But He’s Mine
Fair Exchange
Desperately Seeking Miss October
976-SHOE
Oh, What a Feeling
At the Zoo
It’s a Bundyful Life (two-parter)
Who’ll Stop the Rain
A Taxing Problem
Rock and Roll Girl
You Gotta Know When to Fold `Em (two-parter)
What Goes Around Comes Around
Peggy Turns 300
Peggy Made a Little Lamb
Raingirl
The Agony of Defeet
Yard Sale

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Stuart Rosenberg directs a friendly, shaggy-dog
type of story. It’s a modern day western comedy based on the novel Jim
Kane by J.P.S. Brown and co-scripted by John Gay and Terrence Malick. This
is one of many collaborations between Rosenberg and Newman (“Cool Hand
Luke,” “WUSA” & “The Drowning Pool”). It plays out as character studies
in contrast between two cowboys with big dreams, the naive Jim Kane and
the hard-living but slow-witted Leonard (Newman & Marvin). These two
yokels are taken advantage of in Mexico when they team up in a cattle smuggling
scheme to cross the border to Texas. Crooked rancher Garrett (Strother)
does not pay Jim what he originally promised and the two down-on-their-heels
drifters try to get home by using their questionable business skills to
pull off a scam on the shady cattle baron, but the trail is an adventurous
one–more than what they imagined.

It’s an actionless western, going against the
tradition, that relies on its wry humor and an intelligent script and the
brilliant atmospheric photography by Laszlo Kovacs
to make this paper-thin plot work as the oddball
pair stumble across Mexico. It was made at a time before being politically
correct mattered, so keep an ear peeled for some slurs about Mexicans.

Though the film is not always fufilling it
is so peculiar and doesn’t seem to care that it strays from the usual western,
that therein lies its charm.