This is probably old news to most people, but I just saw the most bizarre show last night.
It looked like Married With Children.
In fact the set looked like MWC.
There was the same kind of father: the same slutty daughter.
I think there were two sons though. But the low-brow humour was identical.
Here’s where it differed:
The mother was a ghost who kept appearing and disappearing like Jeannie or Samantha Stevens.
There was a talking stuffed dog like Alf.
Father Guido Sarducci was in it performing an exorcism on the house! :eek:
Since ‘Unhappily’ is a guilty pleasure of mine, and the only reason I knew the WB existed pre-Buffy, I feel I must point out this distinction.
On MWC, the slutty daughter was dumb and truly promiscuous.
On Unhappily, the daughter was very bright, and a virginal tease.
(looks around.) As you were.
I’m glad you pointed that out, since I was afraid I was going to have to.
I might also mention that the creator of the show was one of the creators of Married With Children, and that is the reason for the similarities between the shows.
IMDB is redoing its television listings so that there is a listing for each episode as well as the entire series. The contributors have to list the cast members that appeared in every individual episode as well as the series as a whole. Obviously, doing this for every TV show would take a lot of work-which is why Ms. Cox is listed so far as only having starred in one episode and other major players only being listed as appearing in only 18 or 69 of the show’s 100 episodes.
I think it’s a leftover from the way that IMDB opened up seperate filmographies on each episode of television shows. Somebody must either have accidentally deleted her from the cast of most of the shows, or more likely after a certain point when nobody confirmed her appearance, she was automatically cleared.
OK, it’s been answered…so…hands up, who knew the answer as soon as they saw Married With Children mentioned?
Thought so.
I think Unhappily was the better of the two shows, but they were pretty blatant about repeating the MWC formula. I mean the set didn’t just look the same, it was identical except for the colour of the wallpaper. (And being a bit cleaner.)
IIRC, everything about it was supposed to be a reverse of Married With Children. Stephanie Hodge was to be the star, the daughter was to be as bright and chaste as Kelly was stupid and promiscuous, the young son was to be savvy beyond his years, etc.
A funny thing happened on its way to reality: everybody hated Stephanie Hodge. She wasn’t at all funny; she just got on the viewers’ nerves. The father in the basement, almost a throwaway character, turned out to be a hit because the scenes with Mr. Floppy, Bobcat Goldthwait in the role he was born to play, were surrealistically wonderful.
Hodge got kicked off the show at the end of the second season except for the few episodes of her as a ghost the next year. In the meantime, Nikki Cox, a stunning sixteen-year-old when they shot the pilot, was a bombshell eighteen-year-old that could have carried the series standing in front of a test pattern. She wore the shortest skirts ever seen on television and her producers filled the audience with marines from a nearby base who went insane with each glimpse of her. Fortunately for her career, Cox was and is an excellent light comedienne and actress. For proof, watch how many beautiful bimbo nemeses they tried against her before they finally found one that she didn’t blow right off the screen. The show got loads better in that third season, and stayed on for two more before falling to the we-can’t-stay-in-high-school-forever curse.
The show is a guilty pleasure, sometimes smart funny, sometimes dumb funny, and too-often just plain dumb and vulgar. It was Fox in the bad old days, remember.
Leaffan, try watching several more episodes to get into the spirit of the show. The episodes were wildly uneven, and you could easily have hit a bad one. The dead mother as returning ghost bit bombed so badly they got rid of it in just a few episodes so better shows are soon on the way if the channel is playing them chronologically.
It’s been airing recently on the ‘Omni’ network here in southern ontario… off Omni 2 in Toronto, they’ve been showing season 2 episodes at 5:30 pm and season 3 or 4 at 11:00. I assume that’s where leaffan came across it.
and - “Fox in the bad old days?” Was it produced by 20th century fox? I don’t think it ever aired on fox network - they had MWC. Unhappily was always on WB, wasn’t it??
I remember, while I was at college, coming across references to it on usenet, but not actually being able to take a look (and check Nikki out in action ) because college cable in Canada naturally didn’t have a WB station. Then I figured out that if I stayed over at my parents on sunday night, I could stay up late and catch the WB primetime, time-shifted from the las vegas affiliate, KTLA. That got me hooked on ‘Savannah’, which was on right after it. (Shannon Sturges and Jamie Luner - boy, the WB always knew how to hire good-lookin’ ladies. )
Okay, I’ve wallowed in nostalgia far too long now.
What seems to have happened is that it originally was on the WB but went into reruns on Fox. I never saw it when first broadcast so I just assumed that Fox was repeating its own show.
IMDb trvia says that Bobcat and Nikki got married. They didn’t. Engaged is as far as they got. Lots of problems with the Unhappily Ever After pages.
) because college cable in Canada naturally didn’t have a WB station. Then I figured out that if I stayed over at my parents on sunday night, I could stay up late and catch the WB primetime, time-shifted from the las vegas affiliate, KTLA. That got me hooked on ‘Savannah’, which was on right after it. (Shannon Sturges and Jamie Luner - boy, the WB always knew how to hire good-lookin’ ladies. 
)