Pop Culture | TV | 90s | 80s
The Heartbreaking Tragedy That Changed An Entire Season Of 'Married With Children'
Watching Married...With Children was always a real family event. Your whole family tended to gather around the TV and laugh with the Bundy family, and appreciate them for being different than the typical TV family.
Normally, families on television always seem to be so proper and put together, but not the Bundys. They were a little bit more wild, a bit more brash, and certainly crazier than the other options on TV.
We all connected with their stories, because Al, Peggy, Kelly, and Bud felt like a real dysfunctional family, which was much more relatable than a family that gets along all the time.
But even after watching all 11 seasons of the show, there is still one storyline that even the most devoted of fans don't know the whole truth behind.
In the premiere episode of season six, the Bundy family friends Jefferson and Marcy tell them that they are expecting a child. But when Al starts laughing at Jefferson, saying it's going to be "the end of his life," Peggy reveals that she is also pregnant.
Al is completely distraught at the thought of having another child, and between his dread and his current children's guilt tripping, he ends up having a nightmare featuring a giant baby that people are still freaked out by (or at least I know I am).
The episodes continue on with aspects of pregnancy life, with Peggy trying to get her family on board with the new addition. Even though Al still worries about money, and Bud takes on the new persona of Grandmaster B, they manage to continue to make us laugh for several episodes.
But in episode 11, everything that had happened turns out to have been a dream. Al wakes up from a dream where he was a detective, but he discovers that the last several episodes were a dream too.
Peggy and Marcy are no longer pregnant, meaning Al doesn't have to worry about another Bundy mouth the feed.
But why did the show suddenly change its direction? Well, they did it out of consideration for the actress who played Peggy, Katey Sagal.
Sagal was actually pregnant when they were filming these episodes, but when she was nearly eight months pregnant, she lost the child.
In 1991, her daughter Ruby was stillborn, and the actress had an understandably hard time coping with the loss.
"It was a very difficult thing," Sagal said while on The View. "I lost a child at almost eight months and ... I could not wrap my brain around it."
She had to try and deal with it while still going back to work as the mother on a popular sitcom.
"This is what they say about stillbirth, that 60 percent of it is God's will and there's no medical reason - and that's what I was told," Sagal said. "And I just couldn't let go of the control of somehow, [the notion that] I had done something wrong."
She found some comfort in a Buddhist friend of hers who said, "Sometimes we have these little souls that come in and out [of our lives,] and their mission is completed."
Sagal would go on to have three other children, two more in her time on Married...With Children, however, neither of those pregnancies were written into the show. "I wouldn't have the three I have, if I hadn't had her," Sagal said about her children.
The reason that the producers of the show decided to turn Peggy's pregnancy into a dream sequence was because they thought that it would traumatic for Sagal to have to work with an infant while she dealt with her loss.
It's sad to hear that Sagal went through such a horrible tragedy while having to act happy and silly on a show, but at least they took care of her and did what was best for the person.
Source - Wikipedia / Married...With Children Wiki / IMDB / Daily Mail / Kiwireport