Why Fox Blocked An Innocent Married... With Children Episode From Being Aired

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a wild time for censorship in television, as parents' interest groups protested anything they deemed was immoral and might have a negative impact on young viewers. This was before the Parental Guidance system that we have on TV today, which was implemented as a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and some folks were worried about the impact of certain kinds of television on impressionable viewers. One especially vocal critic was Terry Rakolta, a mom from Michigan, who led an anti-obscenity boycott campaign against the Fox family sitcom "Married... With Children." Rakolta was especially upset after seeing the season 3 episode "Her Cups Runneth Over," which featured shoe salesman Al Bundy (Ed O'Neill) shopping at a lingerie store for his wife, Peg ("Futurama" star Katey Sagal). Outraged that the episode showed implied nudity and had a number of raunchy jokes, she wrote to Fox and started her boycott campaign, complaining to 42 of the show's advertisers.

Much like streaming services having a knee-jerk reaction in the wake of the George Floyd police protests and removing all episodes with blackface in shows like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and "Community," Fox reacted pretty strongly to Rakolta's campaign. They just went a little overboard, and a rather innocent episode got caught in the crossfire. 

In an interview on Archive of American Television, the series' creator Michael Moye explained that after Rakolta started her protest and advertisers started dropping out, two episodes had to be pulled in order to try and appease more conservative audiences. One episode, "The Camping Show," which apparently had too much discussion of women's periods, was pulled temporarily but aired later. The episode "I'll See You in Court," however, was pulled for decades, finally airing on FX in 2002. This lost episode was pulled because it had a joke about Al and Peg filming a sex tape that had to be used as evidence in court, but their lovemaking was over so quickly that the tape had to be played repeatedly and in slow motion for the jury. Apparently, the folks at Fox were worried that it would be too raunchy for Rakolta and the other morality watchdogs, but when the episode finally aired, people were taken aback for a very different reason. 

According to Moye, audiences were shocked by the episode's relative innocence, finding the filthy jokes totally tame. Moye said that the network executives overreacting and yanking the episode only to have audiences think it was innocuous was "as funny to me as the episode itself." 

As a result of Rakolta's protests and campaign to get the series' advertisers to pull out of their contracts, "Married... With Children" had to tone things down a bit, as Moye told Entertainment Weekly back in 1990. Not only were certain episodes pulled, but the writers had to think a bit more conservatively when it came to the episodes themselves. "Everybody (at Fox) is just a tad more nervous than they were last year," Moye said to EW, going on to note that an episode they had planned around Al getting a circumcision was thrown out as a result. 

The first few seasons of "Married... With Children" are definitely raunchier and ruder than the later ones, though the show continued to run for 11 seasons and was still a pretty great low-brow comedy. A lot can be said for the show's cast, as it was on them to really sell some of the dumber conceits, like a lot of the show's physical and potty humor. It's frustrating that one prudish parent got episodes of television pulled and forced the show's writers to change their work, but at least we still got to see "I'll See You in Court" in the end. It's available as part of home video releases of the show and is included with the series on streaming, which means a lost piece of media is now fully found.