In the Season 6 premiere of Married… With Children, both Marcy (Amanda Bearse) and Peggy (Katey Sagal) announce that they’re pregnant, much to the chagrin of Al (Ed O’Neill). “Oh, Al, isn’t it a dream?” Peggy asks at one point. “It better be,” he barks back at her in response. Those words, unfortunately, would prove to be eerily prescient before the season reached its conclusion.
You see, that whole storyline was conceived to coincide with Sagal’s real-life pregnancy, which she thought was an exciting way of handling things at the time. Sadly, however, Sagal had to have an emergency C-section when she was just seven months pregnant, resulting in a stillbirth in October 1991. To make matters worse, no medical reason was given for the death of her daughter (who she named Ruby), as is apparently the case more than 60% of the time, a baby is lost under such circumstances. In Sagal’s words, this was a “pretty dark period” in her life, and because she’d been working the entire time leading up to the tragedy, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was a contributing factor.
Why ‘Married… With Children’ Suddenly Erased Its Biggest Season 6 Storyline
Naturally, the show’s writers didn’t think it was a good idea to proceed with the pregnancy story arc as they’d originally planned. Rumors were swirling by the end of the month about how the situation would play out on-screen, and even Bearse gave a statement to the press saying that there would be no babies featured on the show that year. In the eleventh episode of the season, entitled “Al Bundy, Shoe Dick,” Al dreams of getting a second job as a janitor for a private detective, only to take on one of the cases himself. After Peggy wakes him up, Al learns that not only was the whole detective thing a dream, but Peggy and Marcy’s pregnancies were as well.
Three years later, Sagal released the musical album Well…, the first of three she’s put out to date. The second track on the record was “Can’t Hurry the Harvest,” which was inspired by the loss of Ruby. Sagal later credited the song with helping her come to terms with what happened. You can check out the official music video for “Can’t Hurry the Harvest” right here.
The post 35 Years Ago, ‘Married… With Children’ Had to Abandon a Major Storyline After a Family Tragedy appeared first on VICE.
