Why wasn't Al Bundy hot for Peggy?

Because she was a nag and didn't wait on him hand and foot. That's what Al really wanted: a submissive housewife. There was even an episode where Peggy acted like the "perfect" wife...she cooked, cleaned and basically was Al's slave. That's when he became attracted to her and wanted to bone her--when she became a subservient wife. Then the big tits and pretty face became icing on the cake.

It's so weird watching this show in retrospect and seeing how sexist it was.

She had shit breath? Dried up pussy?

She was getting old. He was more interested in girls his daughter's age.

Loose and dry as a brown paper bag.

I haven't seen much of the show but I think he was too beaten down by having to work in a shoe store. He just didn't want to fuck when he had free time

They were pretty well cast as a hot couple gone to seed.

Too easy. People want what they can't have

Men get bored with their wives quite often, that's why. He wasn't bored with sex, he just wasn't interested in having sex with her.

For every beautiful woman, there is a man tired of fucking her.

Did he ever go up inside the man?

^ Nah, he was into feet

I think Al wanted Bud's butt. It's pretty nice.

What happened to the guy who played Bud? He was terrific.

He's got smooth skin, R12, but a FUPA as well :(

R1 = Frau or retard. Al didn't want a submissive housewife, he wanted a woman who did SOMETHING. Peg was a lazy mooch who never cooked or cleaned or parented, which is what a stay at home mom usually does. She just ate bon-bons and watched the Home Shopping Network. The show was hilarious and a great antidote to the glurge crap sitcoms of the 1980s.

He was a loser. That was the whole point of the show. He'd rather lust after young girls he has no shot with, than have sex with a real woman.

He resented her for saddling him with a family and responsibility and she resented him for the fact he didn't seem to care about her anymore and was a clown. They both have their humor and I liked the show for how mercilessly they went after each other. I've read rumors that Ed O'Neill may be closeted which is fascinating in the dynamic of Peg v. Al. (And also that Christina A. may be or was closeted and is now out/bi) . Obviously Steve and Marcy were gay. Was anyone straight on this show?

I'd happily take his seed.

Because it was fiction. They wrote her that way.

Al peaked in high school, he had nothing left but bile.

His best known slogan is "no ma'am" - what do you expect?

She gave sloppy blow jobs, with too much teeth, and wouldn't agree to anal.

I bet Peggy could suck the chrome off of a trailer hitch.

Because the show wouldve lost a major running gag and not be the classic that it ended up being. Theyre just acting, remember?

[quote] "They were pretty well cast as a hot couple gone to seed."

Indeed. And Al didn't want to have sex with Peggy because they were married. He'd grown bored, and it had become a chore. Obviously he also resented her (and she him), as others have mentioned. That being said, they discuss this very subject @17:57 in the linked clip.

Segal also changed the dynamic of that relationship, AND the show when she decided she wanted Peggy to be hot. She'd originally been written as a slobbish couch potato, in the image of Roseanne (who at one point, was considered for the role).

I liked it the first few years, but then I tired of the constant meanness. Mean really isn't that funny to me ☹️

I wish a sitcom would have balls to be this mean today. All that Mike Schur "nice comedy" is such shit.

It was the most politically radical sitcom, especially in the early episodes where Marcy is a fundie. They had to dial it down.

Al was underratedly hot in the first couple of seasons. He had played Stanley in Streetcar 2 years prior to MwC And he was also hot as a young cop in Cruising with Al Pacino..

There was a great episode where Dan Castelleneta played a gay man whose boyfriend was regularly out dancing with Peggy. Dan cooks, cleans and likes football. Al is smitten. At one point, he asks Dan why he's sitting so far away from him on the couch.

Her pussy stank

He was secretly gay, OP.

OP, that was the joke. He was hot for her. She was just his type and never lost her figure. He also never cheated on her despite all the trips to the nudie bar.

Al didn’t really want to have sex with anyone. The bit was that he’d pretend Peg was gross and other women were attractive, but he never seriously tried to pursue another woman.

That were basically an updated version of Mr. and Mrs Roper. Mr. Roper liked to complain about the Mrs, but he wasn’t really interested in an alternative, he just got off on belittling her. Any feigned interest in other women was with the intent of insulting the wife, not actually pursuing someone else. In the Ropers’ case, his lack of interest was presumably due to age (both his and hers). In the Bundys’ case I got the impression it was general malaise due to Al’s lot in life.

The famous Al likes the gay episode

she was too thirsty and nasty and a lousy housekeeper/wife.

I want to know how he worked in a shoe store and could afford to live in the same neighborhood as the quintessential DINKs Marcy and Steve.

R26, I feel the same way. It’s why I can’t stand “Everybody Loves Raymond”. They’re all so mean to each other without respite.

In one episode Peggy is advising Marcy on strategies to get what you want from your husband. "You can try withholding sex, but after awhile they start to liking that..."

Hilarious and true. Most straight husbands lead lives of quiet, low-libido despair.

[quote] "Al was underratedly hot in the first couple of seasons. He had played Stanley in Streetcar 2 years prior to MwC And he was also hot as a young cop in Cruising with Al Pacino.."

Ed O'Neill was also an undrafted free agent signed by the Steelers in 1969. So, he had an athletic background, and even his one season/off-season with the Steelers is something Al Bundy could only dream of, but would kill for. I always found that coincidence interesting.

And that episode is hilarious, R35. But I'm biased.

I always thought the song "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" was the Bundys' history written in song.

R25, thank you for that clip, I've never seen that before! Yeah, that and some of the comments put it into perspective. Watching it as a kid I always figured she was exactly what Al would go for, and it didn't make sense to me that he didn't want her.

Al and Peg are in bed. Peggy is trying to cajole Al into sex. The roof starts to leak.

Peggy: Where are you going, Al?

Al: To fix the roof.

Peggy, very seductively: Now why would you want to go up on the roof and fix it when you can stay here and fix me.

Al: Because when I'm done fixing the roof, it won't ask me to fix it again, again and again.

[quote]Why wasn't Al Bundy hot for Peggy?

Because that wasn't the premise of the show. That's not who Al Bundy was.

This is like asking why Kelly wasn't a rocket scientist, why Bud wasn't gay, or why Peggy wasn't a saint. These were actually well defined characters. The writers knew this. Keeping them 2-dimensional made 99% of the jokes work. This wasn't high-brow comedy. This wasn't a show about a guy who was hot for his wife. It was a show about a dysfunctional family where nobody cared for anyone but themselves. And it WORKED.

[quote] It's so weird watching this show in retrospect and seeing how sexist it was.

Funny how I never noticed that back in the day

I agree with some that the young-ish Ed O'Neill was quite do-able.

He's a trainwreck now, even for 76. He's also worth (allegedly) $65 million, which seems overly cautious given his insanely long, profitable runs on MWC and MODERN FAMILY.

Whatever his personal story actually is, it sounds messy and complicated.

Peggy was sexy and definitely pretty. Most straight men wouldn't deny her. But imagine being married to her. She's very very annoying and completely ungrateful to Al. She's absolutely ugly on the inside especially being such an awful mother to her kids. She steals Al's money and complains that he never makes enough. Also Al does find her attractive when she does cook and clean and pulls her weight. It's really he is repulsed by her attitude. She should be grateful that she has a loyal husband who doesn't divorce her and kick out the house.

It's the same deal with Marcy, she's not ugly at all but is a bitchy over the top man-hating Republican feminist with a dyke haircut. But the funny thing is Marcy had two husbands who were both hot and sexy and wanted to have sex with her and there was a period Bud wanted to bang her.

I love the show but it is misogynistic. Ironically it was pretty pro-gay and anti-racist for it's time.

Peggy was originally supposed to be Roseanne Barr which would have made more sense as to why Al found her disgusting. Plenty of trailer park hoes are cute when young but turn fat after having kids and sitting their asses down all day. Katey Sagal decided to make Peggy sexy and coy. Which added to the humor that she was just ugly inside. Katey camped it up in later seasons and Peggy became a drag queen of sorts with the huge hair and overdone fashion and makeup. She was more realistic looking in early seasons.

Homina homina homina....

In 1983.

Familiarity breeds contempt/

How was it sexist? The women were allowed to be as awful as the men were, which is feminist compared to all the previous years of angelic, smiling, submissive sitcom moms. Peg is hot, but that's countered by her materialism and selfishness and horrible parenting. And Al's personal sexism (like the hilarious no m'am club/shirts) was both realistic AND a mark of his loserdom.

All the men on the show were pretty attractive. Younger Al, Jefferson, Steve and Bud after he went through puberty and gained muscles. Kelly had some hot boyfriends. David Boreanaz and Matt Leblanc played some of them.

I believe one of the core writing team on MWG was an openly gay man--but just the one.

I'll check IMDB to see if I can find him.

R52 Good points. Marcy and Peggy were awful human beings to the core. Compare them to the smug self-righteous Maggie from Growing Pains and Clare from The Cosby Show and I can see how that was refreshing.

Marcy is Republican who hates the poor and looks down on the Bundys and while she makes good points on women's rights, she is really self-serving and uses it as a virtue signal. Peggy is entitled, lazy and a slave to the media which tells her all women are princesses and should have husbands who support them. Peggy's favorite shows are Oprah which says a lot. Peggy is the epitome of the Karen who peaked in high school.

The men aren't better. Al is a whiny loser who is also lazy, a bully and ignorant and never tries to improve his life. He never takes responsibility for anything and only has his job because it's a low wage retail job which is hard to be fired from. Steve was also a snobby Republican asshole while Jefferson is a lazy gigolo who exploits his looks and is a con man with a secret life.

The only redeeming characters were Bud and Kelly who managed to be less awful than their parents. Bud actually graduated college and has a promising future despite his family sabotaging him. Kelly actually works unlike her mom is a genius savant who has multiple talents..

I always thought Peg had that unconventional sexy thing going on. Even as a little gay boy, I knew that if Katey Sagal would be really earthy and cool and sexy IRL.

Sexually, my own tastes ran more to Ted Shackelford and Richard Gilliland.

"Ooooooh Al"

[quote] Al is a whiny loser who is also lazy, a bully and ignorant and never tries to improve his life

That's not true. Al initiated several business ventures to advance in the world.

It should noted that this show really helped keep Fox on the map while it was a struggling new broadcast network. Before the NFL deal and The Simpson's, MwC was their breakout hit. Then 90210, Living Single and The X-Files sealed the deal for the network. Murdoch is a piece of shit though but Fox had some good shows.

R47 meh it was as "sexist" towards men as it was towards women. Al was ridiculed as much if not more as Peggy. Kelly was dumb but Bud was a horny toad. It's a caricature of the worse stereotypes and hilarious.

There was a really funny episode where there was a serial peeper in the neighborhood and he got everyone but Peggy. She even leaves a ladder by her window and cookies and milk to try to entice him. Al feels bad for her and disguises himself as the peeper but the women in the neighborhood think he's the real culprit and beat him up. One of the victims was very old and Peggy incredulously asks, "you were peeped?" She said yes and it was terrible. Al says, "but what was it like for you?" When a beautiful woman says she was peeped, Al yells "that beast!"

Al caused our ovaries to ovulate!

I liked when Peggy went to Kelly's school for career day and made all the girls want to be a housewife like her

The best line from the scene at R58 from Peggy:

Boy, if I had to service you every time you did something stupid, I'd be flatter than an all-beef patty.

My favorite part of that episode is Al just standing there in the ladder trying to get caught not knowing what to do other than start saying "Peep.....Peep...Peeper here!!!"

Erectile dysfunction before Viagra, OP.

Al was a gay but too lazy to do anything but look at Bud's butt.

I didn't like the show much the last few years. It just got too cartoonish.

I still think Ed O'Neil was robbed of a comedy Emmy

for all the meannesss, low brow humor, misogyny and so on... thank goodness this show was a equal opportunity show off of looks and bodies not only with women, but with MEN...

plenty of episodes showed off men (male strippers, bodybuilders, the super fit personal trainer, stripper grams, men on spring break in speedos, hunks on the beach and so on and so on)....

If there was anything implausible about this show, it was the fact that Al supported a family of four with a mortgage and two car payments with a retail job.

There were often some surprising moments of the family sticking together. Once, Kelly was invited to a genius party, which turned out to be a party where the people brought the stupidest people, sort of a reverse pig party. Bud finds out and tells Kelly and they and rest of the invitees then beat the hell out of the MENSA members.

R71... true and he wasn't even manager at the shoe store, Then again, maybe he had worked there for years and years and was getting "manager pay"?...

[quote]Al was ridiculed as much if not more as Peggy.

Al was given little wins throughout the series, where the coked-up, lowbrow audience could cheer for him and hoot and holler at how awful those bitches in his life were.

MWC was meant as a satire, obviously, but all it did was take the worst parts of American culture, amplify them, and nothing else. It was the television equivalent of farting into a bullhorn.

The "No Ma'am" stuff was definitely Limbaugh-adjacent.

Older Bud was hawt!

R74 it was a caricature, plain and simple, and alot of times they say much more and can be more truthful than their "realistic" or measured works of fiction. I feel your experience with the show must be very limited if you see the show that way, though I do agree that the last few years of the show it was bordering on "farting into a bullhorn". 5

MWC was a savage satire. It came out in the Reagan years. In that setting, the loser Everyman, and his family was the complete opposite of what America was presenting to itself and others.

In the early episodes, Marci was even a fundamentalist in those moral majority years. Now that, they had to tone down and make her a run of the mill Republican with the accompanying righteousness, hypocrisy and absurdity.

I think it was brilliant.

I figured that Al had to marry Peg because he got her pregnant in highschool and resented the fact.

[quote]I've read rumors that Ed O'Neill may be closeted

Ha ha ha, does it never end?

Al Bundy was projecting. He was no prize himself.

I always liked how the Bundys no problems with minorities and gays as friends. Al and Peggy's circle of friends were diverse. Al was surprisingly cool with gays and lesbians. Finding he had more in common with them than hetero women. Compare to other sitcoms like Family Ties, Growing Pains, Full House, Home Improvement, Friends, Seinfeld and Who's The Boss where people of color don't seem to exist. Married with Children actually reflected the demographics of Chicago.

Miranda Veracruz de la Jolla Cardinal was one of their very best recurring characters

R82 agree with your post but there was actually quite alot of people of color in Seinfeld. And unlike the ones that very occasionally showed up in the other shows, they weren't tokens

Jim Jupiter didn't want to sleep with Peggy either. He was "the healthiest man in Chicago" until he spent a week with Peggy. Great episode.

Hi, I'm Jim Jupiter, the healthiest man in Chicago.

Hi, I'm Bud Bundy, studliest man on earth.

Wasn't Katey segal in a bay area rock band?

Katey was one of Bette Midler's Harlettes. Her sisters are the twins Liz and Jean Sagal who had their own NBC show and were in Grease 2.

Because being hot for someone takes work.

Hot Take. Al was gay.

Al being gay makes sense. He bitches about his attractive wife who still dresses up, kept her figure even after having two kids and eating bonbons all day and desires to have sex with him even though he's a slob. Most hetero men would dream of that. And Al had chances to cheat on Peg but never did so and these were smoking hot Playboy Playmates who threw themselves at him. Al rather spend time with his guy friends like Jefferson and Steve and his misogynistic all-mens club.

R85... jim jupiter was hot! I wish they would have shown how peggy seduced him into being a chain smoking, out of shape bon bon eating, oprah tv watching normal guy, course time didnt' allow for that in a 1 episode storyline...

Can't quickly find a clip but there was one early episode Peggy started getting hot for Marcy. That would have been a good scenario to develop.

Katey doesn't get enough credit for being such a great television actress. She's versatile. Even though a lot of her vehicle shows fail. She's great in ensembles. Her roles of Peggy, Leela and Gemma alone made her stamp on TV history. And her voice is extremely distinctive.

Aren’t we all men here? Gay and straight, men are all the same in one regard — sexual partners are only exciting for so long.

Go ahead and deny it.

he was married with children.

this is a topic less for fraus and gays than lesbians, they have the most experience with bed death.

I don't think men will deny it. Many love their partners to death but lose sexual desire for each other especially after having kids. A lot of older women lose sexual desire in general. Gay couples at least are open to open relationships. Most straight men and women are never open to it mainly because men would get insecure about their wives being with other men and vice versa for women.

This might have been why. 😝

Obviously the late Karen Dior but a damn good likeness.

Peggy showing all those supposedly "accomplished" moms how it's done!