Product: Married... with Children: The Complete Third Season (1987)
Rating: 5.0
No original theme.. Does it really matter?
Married with Children is not only one of my all time favorite shows, but if I were to make a list of the top five sitcoms ever made, Married with Children would definately be on that list. The story behind the show never gets old. You have an aging and bitter shoe salesman named Al Bundy who was a big football star in high school that was forced to give everything up to marry his high school sweetheart Peggy. The premise of the show is to focus on the daily life of the Bundy family including an extremely attractive but unintelligent daughter Kelly, a sex crazed son named Bud that never gets the girl, and a lazy dog named Buck. The funniest thing about the Bundy family, is that despite the misery they put each other through, they always seem to band together when times are tough and others are going against them. Despite the fact that they live in a dumpy house and Al has one of the worst jobs imaginable, the Bundy's really do show at times that they are a family. The show combines top notch writing and great acting from Ed O Neil and company, as well as non-stop laughs.The third season of Married with Children is when the show really started to hit its stride. The first two seasons were very good, but you could tell in the third season that the show was heading for bigger and better things. The storylines in the third season are somehow funnier and more entertaining than the last two seasons. A few examples of this are - "He Thought He Could" in which Al finds an extremely overdue library book from 1957 and is forced to confront the elementary school librarian that made his life hell; "The Camping Show" in which The Bundy's and Steve and Marcy all go on a camping trip and unfortunately for the men, Peggy, Kelly, and Marcy all get their period; "A Dump of My Own" in which Al sets out to build his own bathroom in the garage; "The Gypsy Cried" in which a psychic tells Marcy that she is going to die in a plane crash, and Al, Peggy, and Steve are all forced to go along because she is covinced that they all have good luck; and "Here's Lookin' at You, Kid" in which every woman in the neighboorhood gets spied on by an annoymous peeping tom, except for Peggy and she begins to try and do anything to attract the peeper's attention. The third season DVD set also features the episode "I'll See You In Court" that was never allowed to air on TV as an added bonus.Overall, the third season of Married with Children is when the show really did hit its stride, and some of the series' best episodes are in the third season. Personally, I feel that if you are a fan of the show, it would be a shame not to buy the third season for a few reasons. One, if sales on the DVD sets suffer, then the rest of the seasons won't be released. Secondly, since the third season is so good, does it really matter that the original theme is not included? Most of the time, when watching a show on DVD, don't you usually just skip past the theme to watch the episode? The episodes themselves are going to be uncut and that is all that really matters in my opinion.A solid 5 stars...