A TRIBUTE: The co-creator of the hit sitcom passes away at age 60 but leaves us the laughs that he created in more than 200 episodes of the pioneering Fox network comedy

By Alex Ben Block

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 1/12/2008 – The seminal situation comedy “Married…With Children,” which promises to rerun forever, was actually based on Ron Leavitt’s real life story, written with his partner Michael Moye as they invented the first anti-sitcom. It was their take on what life would be like if a pair of loudmouth comedy stars of that moment, Sam Kiniston and Roseanne Barr, got married and had a couple children.

When I interviewed Leavitt and Moye for my book “OUTFOXED: The Inside Story of America’s Fourth Network,” they were both already a success, having produced “The Jeffersons” and several other shows before creating “Married.”

“Married” was to be their master work. Leavitt told me it “was always meant to be a man-woman thing…It was called ‘Married…With Children,” because the children were, like, there. It was a different way of people getting along. Man against woman. We gave Al Bundy a lot of raps about what has happened to men. Once it was good to be a guy. Men were kings. Now were just a pussy whipped nation. He doesn’t understand what happened.”

But Leavitt understood. Tall and gregarious, with a thick head of black hair and a long face and prominent nose, Leavitt spoke with the distinctive Brooklyn accent of his youth. It had been a hard scrabble existence growing up. His father died when Leavitt was very young, and he suffered under a series of stepfathers until he escaped New York City for the University of Miami, then known as a premier party school.

Predictably Leavitt flunked out. He returned home and took a series of low level jobs. Then he decided he could write better shows than what he saw on TV. He hated the typical syrupy sitcom. It made him physically sick. That was the beginning of his dream of creating a show that would be the opposite of the usual network fare feature a nice mom and dad and the moral happy ending. Leavitt and Moye’s code for the show in development, and the title of the pilot episode, wass “Not The Cosby Show,” a reference to a popular sitcom of the era in which genteel comedian Bill Cosby was the perfect dad with all the right answers.

“We’ve heard about people in therapy since they were fifteen because they would watch ‘Father Knows Best’ and their family wasn’t that great,” Leavitt told me about the genesis of “Married.”

“We figured we’d show them a real family and save them some money,” said Levitt. “They don’t need a psychiatrist. Nobody’s happy out there.”

His own escape from unhappiness came with a phone call. In 1977, Leavitt had mailed off a script for a half hour TV show called “Busting Loose,” a sitcom that starred Adam Arkin as a single guy with meddling parents. Then to his surprise, Leavitt got a call and a job offer. He and his wife moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

Leavitt listened, learned from the older writers, and contributed his own ideas. He was out of work after 16 weeks when the show was cancelled, but he quickly moved on to work for Garry Marshall at Paramount on “Happy Days.”

Then Leavitt made a deal at Embassy Communications, a company that Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin controlled, which was looking to expand in television. It was there Leavitt fell in with Michael Moye, who shared his sensibility and distain for syrupy sitcoms. They became partners. “We have no suits and ties and we don’t hang around with the Hollywood hoi polloi,” Moye told me. “We had another thing in common—a distain for people who think they’re doing Moliere out there.”

“Our feeling was first and foremost to entertain,” said Leavitt. “We like to be funny. We think that’s what a comedy should be if it’s called a comedy.”

The creative spark that ignited “Married” started with Garth Ancier, who was then head of programming for Fox, and now runs BBC America. Ancier felt that while a “Cosby” might work on an established network, Fox had to do something different, something bold, something that would only appear n the upstart Fox network, which was then being programmed for teens and young adults.

To attract this young hip audience, Ancier decided he needed “The Honeymooners” for a new generation. He wanted it to have the edge and impact of CBS’s pioneering Norman Lear comedy “All In The Family,” which featured an unrepentant bigot and bully. “The best characters on TV have been obnoxious, rude,” said Ancier, a wunderkind who had been a student of TV and had his own radio show as a teenager. “But now you’ve got to be so straight-laced and TV is here to teach. Well, TV ain’t here to teach. School is here to teach. TV is here to entertain.”

Ancier wanted to break all the old rules and to do the job he turned to Leavitt and Moye, one white and one black, both with an off-beat sense of humor Ancier had a hunch would appeal to the his young audience they sought for Fox. He gave them complete freedom to create the show and characters, although they later would learn there were limits on the level of freedom, even at Fox. It is still an FCC regulated broadcaster.

Barry Diller had been hired by Rupert Murdoch to revive Twentieth Century Fox and then assemble a team to create the first new broadcast network in a generation. Diller had been personally courting some of the top talent in Hollywood for the launch of Fox Broadcasting, but there was a reluctance to join with an unknown venture instead of a company with a solid record.

Ancier reached out to Moye and Leavitt who had their deal at Embassy, where they had been the producers and writers on the series “The Jeffersons,” although they did not create it. When that show was cancelled in 1985, Leavitt and Moye began developing other shows together, including doing work on “Silver Spoons.”

What Ancier told them was that he would not put any restrictions on them. He wanted them to be as creative as possible. “Do anything you want, but make sure it’s different and funny,” said Ancier. “Do something that would never be on the other networks, something a little more daring, more biting. Fox is here to give you the chance to do things you can’t do anywhere else.”

In the meanwhile Embassy was sold to the Coca Cola Company, which already owned Columbia Pictures. The syndication division suits at Columbia Pictures Television were against Leavitt and Moye working with Fox. Their reasoning was that a show on Fox would not be widely seen, so it would not have as high a profile and thus as great a value for them as it would if they worked on a show for the traditional big three – CBS, NBC and ABC.

It was only Leavitt and Moye insisting that they be allowed to work with this new network that offered them more freedom than anyone else to create the show they wanted to make. Ironically of course, as it actually worked out a few years later, “Married” commanded a premium in first run syndication for exactly that reason – it has not been seen as widely as if it was on the big 3. It brought a record price at the time, and has continued to be a staple in syndication year after year.

“What we didn’t want,” recalled Leavitt, “was to look at Fox as the fourth place to sell. We didn’t want an idea everybody else rejected. We wanted something we could only do on Fox. They deserved to be the outlet you go to because you want some creative freedom.”

Moye first had the idea to do a show about a man and woman who battle all the time, but it was Leavitt’s real life story with his wife that soon became the model, and the source for many of the incidents that became comedy on the show. Like Peg Bundy, his Brooklyn born wife told him she didn’t cook and that he better get used to it.

When it came time to tape, the final script came back from the network with a line deleted that sent both Leavitt and Moye into fits of anger. It was in an episode titled “The Period Piece.” Al was complaining to his neighbor Steve about women with PMS. Al says “Women can shoot their husbands and get away with it. It’s this period, PMS thing.” Then Al looks over his shoulder and says philosophically, “I think PMS really stands for Pommel Men’s Scrotums.”

Fox pulled that line. Leavitt pleaded with Ancier, “ You told us to be free. Now you tell us not to be free. Which is it?”

Ancier said “If it wasn’t the first show…”

Leavitt and Moye stormed out into the afternoon sunshine feeling gloomy. They discussed just walking away from the entire project. They thought about going to Diller, known for being icy cold and tough at times, and decided that wasn’t a good idea. Leavitt said that they finally decided that as bad as it was at Fox it would be worse if they were at NBC. Even with the cut, the network put off airing that episode for two months, so that the show’s trademark hard edged comedy would be more established. As it turned out, in the years that the show was in production, Fox rarely interfered after that.

Fox even took some heat in the late 1980s that was the best thing that ever happned to the show. It was protests against the raunchy content by a Michigan mom in the late 1980s that got a lot of publicity and brought “Married” to the attention of a much wider audience. The more she protested, the higher the ratings went. And what they saw was a really fun TV show, so they stayed and came back often.

It became the biggest hit on the Fox network, and one of the top comedies on TV year after year. By 1995, ”Married…With Children” was the longest-running situation comedy currently on network television. Leavitt and Moye produced 201 episodes over ten years, ending in 1997.

Leavitt tried to re-create the magic for the WB network with his comedy “Unhappily Ever After,” once again patterned on his life – this time on his divorce. He was also involved with a short lived show called “The Help” in 2004.

Leavitt also hooked up with Jessica Hahn, who went from political scandal to Playboy model, and in the last years of his life became his booty call and then fiancé.

Leavitt is survived by two children from his first marriage, Matt and Samantha.

Leavitt had overcome a troubled childhood, and his own self-destructive instincts to use his creative talents to express himself like no one else. He had been called a loser by a series of loser step fathers and he had flunked out of college; but he had redeemed himself, and become an influence on television. Like “I Love Lucy,” the show “Married…With Children” will go on entertaining audiences for many years to come, and so the independent spirit of Ron Leavitt lives on through those shows. So what better way to end this tribute to the late producer, writer and creator of “Married…With Children,” than with a great Al Bundy speech. This one is from episode 302, when Mrs. De Groot calls Al “a loser.”

Al replies: “So you think I’m a loser? Just because I have a stinking job that I hate, a family that doesn’t respect me, a whole city that curses the day I was born? Well, that may mean loser to you, but let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up, I know it’s not going to get any better until I go back to sleep again. So I get up, have my watered down Tang and still-frozen Pop Tart, get in my car with no upholstery, no gas and six more payments to fight traffic just for the privilege of putting cheap shoes on the cloven hooves of people like you. I’ll never play football like I thought I would, I’ll never know the touch of a beautiful woman, and I’ll never again know the joy of driving without a bag on my head. But I’m not a loser. ‘Cause despite it all, me and every other guy who’ll never be what he wanted to be, are still out there, being what we don’t wanna be, forty hours a week, for life. And the fact that I haven’t put a gun to my mouth, you pudding of a woman, makes me a winner!”