He became the grumbling, life-worn antithesis to the sanitized TV dads of the 1980s; his dysfunctional, backbiting, ribald, lower-middle-class on-air family the flagship of a fledgling network called Fox. Playing Al Bundy on “Married…with Children” (Fox, 1987-1997) for 11 seasons, Ed O’Neill made himself perhaps the least likely and least glamorous star in television. Within a few years, “Married…” transformed O’Neill from a New York theater actor with little comedic background into a comic icon of the bleak side of the American Dream, or an avatar of a cultural apocalypse subverting the
