Out of the sugary-sweet ashes of the "happy family" fare of late 1980s television comedies, epitomized by The Cosby Show, Family

Ties, and Growing Pains and their sweater-wearing characters, the unabashedly raunchy Fox sitcom Married … with Children rose up like a dysfunctional phoenix and outlasted almost every competitor on television.

Married … with Children was created by ex-Jefferson's writers Ron Leavitt and Michael Moye, who were given the green light by Fox to do something other than the standard TV fare. "We tried to take traditional sitcom cliches and subvert them," Michael Moye said in Newsweek in 1996. He and his partner came up with the sexually-charged version of the old radio comedy The Bickersons. The cutting-edge show put Fox on the map (and set its...