I have almost every released season of Married With Children on DVD, but I still preferred watching episodes on F/X because they included the signature “Love and Marriage” theme song.  F/X stopped broadcasting reruns midsummer, but TBS has picked up the slack and began airing the show in September.  SpikeTV also purchased rights to MWCand the two cable networks agreed on timeslots to broadcast the sitcom.  According to Sitcoms Online, MWC is the only new show TBS has purchased for 2008.  SpikeTV and TBS have rights to the show for five years, so we’ll be seeing a lot more of the dysfunctional Bundy family. 

In addition to being the greatest sitcom ever created, MWC has a global appeal and is a highly profitable and marketable license property.  Click here for a NYT article discussing MWC’s popularity in Russia. 

MWC’sairdates on SpikeTV are bit unclear, but TBS airs three consecutive episodes of MWC beginning at 5:30am.  I’ve never looked forward to waking up at the asscrack of dawn until now.  WHOA BUNDY! 

During a recent episode of Family Guy on TBS, Bill Engvall appeared on screen with a remote control and paused the show.  Engvall then proceeds to promote the new season of his show as Family Guy remains frozen in the background.  What the audience didn’t know was that when Engvall appeared, the show had begun a commercial break.  In the past, TBS has wonderfully and seamlessly integrated commercial content into its programming, (the “Very Funny” ad campaigns, for instance) but this time the cable network sought to be deliberately intrusive. 

TV networks have gotten extremely aggressive with the bottom corners of the screen.  Some cable outlets even let pieces of promotional flotsam, known in the industry as “snipes,” rise from the corners and take up the bottom third of the TV screen.  More recently, however, these animated promos have become decidedly more intrusive, blocking action as it unfurls on the screen or even competing with spoken dialogue. 

Giving the spastic nature of Family Guy, the promo may not annoy people as much as it would if had aired on a show such as Lost, which commands a significant amount of audience attention.  I think viewers will be seeing a lot more aggressive snipes in the future, especially on syndicated shows in reruns where broadcasters may assume that they are already familiar with the content and plot.  The sneaky TBS tactic has already generated quite a bit of discussion, but too bad the effort was wasn’t on such a sub-par show as Bill Engvall.