Married…With Children coming back as an animated show for some damn reason

Married…With Children has always occupied a sort of weird place in the cultural landscape—too crass to be categorized with your Roseannes in the “blue collar sitcom masterpiece” bucket, but too filled with undeniable comedy talent (and too straight-up successful) to summarily dismiss. Despite running for 259 episodes, from 1987 to 1997, the series has largely disappeared from the wider conversation…until now!

That’s right, folks: Cue up “Bad To The Bone,” and also all your jokes about not wanting to have sex with your wife, because Married…With Children is coming back—now in animated form, for some reason. This is per Deadline, which reports that Family Guy producer Alex Carter is teed up to serve as the showrunner. More important, though, is the news that moves this thing from “Jesus Christ, why?” to “Well…okay, let’s wait and see”: The reveal that series stars Ed O’Neill, Katey Sagal, Christina Applegate, and, yes, David Faustino are all on board to voice their respective Bundys.

Presumably spurred on by the fact that Sagal and O’Neill, especially, have been reliable TV performers over the 25 years since the show went off the air—and the endless necromantic urges, buried deep in the hearts of TV executives everywhere, who never met a recognizable brand they wouldn’t happily drag, Murphy Brown-style, from its peaceful grave—Deadline reports that the show is “being pitched to networks and streamers and is getting strong interest.”

From the outside, we can kind of understand the decision to go animated with this; although Faustino supposedly almost got Sony to bite a few years ago on a spinoff focused on his character, titled Bud—evidence, if nothing else, of how bad Remake Fever got in recent years—an animated show would let audiences check back in with the Bundys as they remembering them, i.e., a nuclear family in permanent meltdown. (Also: Most of the cast is pretty busy most of the time, so animation would obviously be easier on their schedules.)

The original Married…With Children still runs on streaming at Hulu and Peacock; the series was an early hit for Fox back in the late ’80s, helping put the then-new network on the map.