Ron Leavitt, 60; co-creator of 'Married . . . With Children'
Ron Leavitt, a veteran 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.
Leavitt died of lung cancer Sunday at his home in Sherman Oaks, said publicist Larry Winokur.
Ed O'Neill, who played Al Bundy on the show, told The Times on Monday that Leavitt was "one of the funniest guys I ever knew."
"He had a very original way of thinking in terms of comedy," O'Neill said. "He was a brilliant comedic writer."
David Duclon, one of Leavitt's former writing and producing partners, agreed.
"We lost a tremendous talent," Duclon said. "He had a very unique and sardonic view of the world that he was able to translate into his writing, and yet, personally, he was one of the sweetest, gentlest, kindest men I've ever known."
"The Cosby Show," Bill Cosby's feel-good family sitcom on NBC, was TV's top-rated show when "Married . . . With Children" debuted on Fox in April 1987.
Leavitt and co-creator Michael G. Moye called the new series "the anti-Cosby."
Indeed, no 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-blond 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," Leavitt told The Times in 1997.
Leavitt 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."
Leavitt believed the show became "a guilty pleasure" for its audience, "something that they knew was always going to be nothing but funny."
Not everyone thought it was funny.
Early on, Jesse Helms, the former longtime GOP senator from North Carolina, called the show "trash." And Terry Rakolta, a Michigan housewife concerned with the series' racy content, launched a high-profile campaign to pressure advertisers to boycott the show.
