Directing Animator / Contributor
Posted:
Feb 13, 2008, 2:46 PM
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"Married with Children" cocreator Ron Leavitt dies
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A landmark long running sitcom, indeed.
Ron Leavitt - co-created 'Married ... With Children'
Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, February 13, 2008 
(02-13) 04:00 PST Los Angeles -- Ron Leavitt, a television writer and producer best known for co-creating "Married ...With Children," the raunchy, groundbreaking sitcom that helped put the fledgling Fox network on the map in the late 1980s, has died. He was 60.
Mr. Leavitt died of lung cancer Sunday at his suburban Los Angeles home, publicist Larry Winokur said.
"He was one of the funniest guys I ever knew," said Ed O'Neill, who played Al Bundy on "Married ... With Children."
"The Cosby Show," Bill Cosby's feel-good family sitcom on NBC, was TV's top-rated show when "Married ... With Children" premiered on Fox in 1987. Mr. Leavitt and co-creator Michael Moye called their new comedy series "the anti-Cosby."
Indeed, no other TV family was like the dysfunctional Bundys: chauvinistic women's shoe salesman Al and his lascivious, anti-homemaker wife Peggy (Katey Sagal), with whom he traded crude insults and sexual innuendoes. And then there were the children: Kelly (Christina Applegate), the Bundys' promiscuous, dumb-blonde daughter; and Bud (David Faustino), their conniving, girl-crazy son, who was named after his father's favorite beer.
"People love the naughtiness - that here was a guy, Al Bundy, who said the things about his life, about his wife, that we all sometimes think but can never say out loud," Mr. Leavitt told the Los Angeles Times in 1997.
He said the show was his and Moye's "adolescent rebellion against all those shows where everyone sat together at the dinner table and got along and talked and hugged and solved the world's problems in 22 minutes. I would go nuts seeing that. That wasn't my memory of what it was like to eat with my family."
The show had its critics. Jesse Helms, the former longtime Republican senator from North Carolina, called it "trash." Terry Rakolta, a housewife concerned about the series' content, campaigned to pressure advertisers to boycott the show.
A few advertisers reportedly pulled their commercials, but ratings for "Married ... With Children" went higher.
Mr. Leavitt was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 7, 1947, and graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in journalism. He worked as a reporter in the Miami area before starting his television career as a writer on the 1977 sitcom "Busting Loose," starring Adam Arkin.
(This post was edited by artytoons on Feb 13, 2008, 2:47 PM)
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Key Animator
Posted:
Feb 22, 2008, 6:28 PM
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Re: "Married with Children" cocreator Ron Leavitt dies
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Aww man that's too bad.
R.I.P. Mr.Leavitt.
Thanks for entertaining me with the funny sitcom that is, Married With Children
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