True, but I think that really good comedy can get people to laugh or identify with the characters without them necessarily having been in that situation.
Anyway, there’s no way in hell I’d ever find Doris Roberts funny even if I did have the mother in law from hell. She’s meant to be annoying but it’s still not funny. Having dinner with her would only be slightly more preferable to a meal with Borat (and that’s only because of the feces and unappealing hookers).
I have no cite, but I think ELR was a much more realistic presentation of middle class life on Long Island living across the street from your overbearing mother/m-i-l than Blackadder was of 16th century English aristocracy or 18th century English butlering.
I think this sums it up well. The premise of the show was hardly original and there are definitely episodes I don’t bother watching, such as most of the ones focusing on the children. For sure, not every moment of every show was hilarious but when they got it right they got it *very *right (the one where Amy’s mother, as portrayed by Georgia Engel, admits to father character Fred Willard that she smokes and everyone’s subsequent confessions makes me howl every time). I could barely stand Patricia Heaton during the first season but I think she grew into a great comedic actress. I can see how people are turned off by what they cosider a constant stream of meanness between the characters; that’s exactly how I feel about Married With Children.
“Bad Moon Rising.” That is one of my all-time favorite episodes of any show. Pure genius.
Married with Children started out as a satire, though, completely turning around the prevailing (at that point) notion of the Leave it to Beaver sitcom family. Of course, it eventually turned into the kind of dumbed-down, audience-hooting sitcom it had been mocking, but it was pretty sharp in the beginning, when it wasn’t supposed to be taken at face value. The late '80s/early '90s was actually a pretty creative time for sitcoms - that seemed to be the start of toying with convention to expand what sitcoms could be, thanks in large part to Fox, which had The Simpsons, MWC, and Get A Life, as well as the shows Gary Shandling did for Showtime and HBO.
Agree with you about ELR; not genius or groundbreaking, but I don’t get the hate, either. Some of the comedy was quite well-observed, and nowhere near the '70s/'80s level standard dreck that, say, Two and a Half Men indulges in.
But your reactions could be very funny. That’s the real point of this kind of humor.
Or overbearing mother and weird father. Many’s the time I’ve identified with Ray and Robert.
I always thought Deborah was one of the hottest TV moms ever until she got WAY skinny after the first few seasons.
Deborah… definitely a tv mom hottie.
The only thing I can compare ELR to (for the people that don’t like the characters) is Cheers.
Some characters you just love to hate… for me, Marie fits that.
However on Cheers, Diane was character that people loved to hate… not me. I just hated her, and with a few exceptions I couldn’t stand watching her. (Although the episode where she and Sam slap each other multiple times is pretty freaking hilarious.)
Some really good comedy can, but that doesn’t mean that all really good comedy should. Not at all.
Yes, I can see hating a character so much it kills any sitcomy enjoyment. For me it was Martin. God, I hated the character and the show with a burning passion. It didn’t help that I thought he was enforcing the dumb ghetto-assed nigger stereotype and was proud of it.
Full disclosure: I am black (and hispanic) and I live in a house on Long Island. My in-laws are both dead, though. They were good people but I don’t think I would have liked having them live across the way from me.
When he tries to hug her I absolutely weep with laughter.
My favorite episode was of Marie’s sculpture.
I loved the show! I don’t get the hate.
(along with Malcolm in The Middle - I watch the reruns religiously)
I never really “got” the show. It was amazingly popular but I never vibe into what people found so compelling about it. To me it was just a mediocre sitcom. It was “OK”, but his parents were repellent and his wife was just plain tiresome.
I love ELR, but that’s because a number of the characters have what we can see as very exaggerated traits of some of our family members. If you can’t laugh at yourself, worry not, because everybody else can.
And my favorite episode is the one with the wooden spoon and fork. Just absolutely slays me whenever I see it.
I enjoyed it, and still catch it on reruns from time to time, but I don’t think “compelling” describes anyone’s affection for it.
It was, within the three-camera/laugh-track domestic sitcom genre, a very well crafted show, and featured consistently good performances by Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts. Ray Romano was the weak link in the cast, but that’s often the case with standup comics who get cast as leads.
Don’t let a suitcase full of cheese become your big fork and spoon.
My favourite was the one where Robert and his girlfriend kept getting SEEN having sex.
Especially when they were doing it in Ray’s basement, just for the image of her coming upstairs, wearing nothing but Robert’s uniform pants. Cracks me up just thinking about it.
I liked ELR well enough. It was never a favorite, but it was consistently at least moderately funny and occasionally hilarious. The family sitcom is of course nothing new, but I can think of far more boring and predictable examples of the genre.
People who think the show was unfailingly bland must never have seen that episode. 
Frank’s final line: “When did we get those?”
Another great scene: Paul Reubens as the comic book store owner.
I never watched ELR in prime time because I assumed it was one of those typical family-style sitcoms, ho ho ho, blech.
Then I saw a few eps during the early-evening syndication block on one of the local UHF stations. I was amazed at how very funny it could be. Every episode? No. Many episodes, and many moments? Lord yes. And I don’t necessarily identify with any of the characters, I’m not married, I don’t have kids. They worked pretty hard to NOT be “one of those family sitcoms.” The kids were background noise 99% of the time. The mother wasn’t cuddily – loved her family, sure, but not a typical sitcom mom. Father definitely didn’t know best, but he also wasn’t the butt of all the jokes. The grandparents were the craziest members of the family, except for Robert, who was nice but definitely had a few quirks.
There are some ELR eps where I have laughed as hard as I have ever laughed at anything, and that includes Monty Python, which I adore. All the scenes mentioned here are on that list (the couch, the big fork and spoon, the sculpture), as are:
[ul]
[li] Robert decides to be black (“Thank you. pause Superfly.”) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUo940MF9Nw[/li][li]Marie describes an time where Frank emptied a jar of carefully-collected pork fat to use the jar for spare change (describing Frank as “Il Duce”)[/li][li]Marie and Frank explain the exact circumstances of their marriage and why Robert’s birthday isn’t when he thinks it is[/li][li]Ray and Robert and Frank paint the house, and Marie gets in the way http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4zIAioLyT4[/li][li]Ray teaching the twins to be fairies[/li][li]Robert asking Amy’s parents for her hand, and their telling him no[/li][/ul]
And I’m sure there are more, that’s all I can think of right now …