‘Married… With Children’ Kicked Its Cousin Oliver Character Off the Show

What was Married… With Children thinking? 

Somehow, in the show’s seventh season, producers fell prey to Cousin Oliver Syndrome, that misguided sitcom axiom that says adding a cute kid will boost sagging ratings. The reason the strategy is misguided: Adding an adorable moppet (like The Brady Bunch did near the very end of its run) is always a death knell, a final, wheezing gasp before sitcoms ascend to that ethereal Nick at Nite in the sky. 

In the case of Married… With Children, Cousin Oliver arrived in the form of a kid named Seven. In that season’s premiere, Peg’s weirdo cousins, played by Bobcat Goldthwait and Linda Blair, abandon their young kid at the Bundy house. Peg takes a liking to the tyke and decides to keep him. For a while, anyway.

Play

Michael Moye, one of the show’s creators, ironically chalks up the decision to the growing success of the Fox network, thanks to shows like The Simpsons, Beverly Hills 90201 and Married… With Children. “Now that they were beginning to emerge as a real network,” he says in Married… With Children Vs. The World, “they started thinking like a real network and thought bringing in Seven was a good idea — and it wasn’t.”

Unlike the syrupy family comedy of The Brady Bunch, the jokes on Married… With Children were often sexual or sadistic. The show’s writers had no idea how to work a six-year-old kid into those kinds of punchlines. One such attempt: Al fantasizes about Seven getting sick (hurray?), and to pay the kid’s medical bills, he has to bartend in a topless club. 

Even if writers could make the jokes work, kid actor Shane Sweet couldn’t, at least according to David Faustino, who played Bud Bundy. “It was awful. It was the worst mistake they ever made,” Faustino said in 2019, per Remind Magazine. “And the kid — and God bless his soul, I mean, I’m sure he’s talented at something else — he just wasn’t an actor. So, you know, the poor kid. They’re like, ‘Get out there and say your lines.’ Kid’s just like, ‘Ahhhh.’ Like, he had no fucking clue what he was doing. So consequently, he got fired. It’s a cold business out there. I don’t care if you’re five — you’re getting fired.”

Rather than sending Seven back to his parents, Married… With Children pulled a Chuck Cunningham (Richie’s older brother who mysteriously disappeared from Happy Days after the first few episodes). Seven simply ceased to exist. No explanation. No “Hey, has anybody seen Seven?” The show merely carried on as if it had never made the Cousin Oliver mistake in the first place. 

After a long absence, Married… With Children did make one final Seven reference. “The funniest thing about that kid,” remembered Ed O’Neill, “was 14 episodes later when Bud opened up the refrigerator and Seven’s photo appeared on a missing child announcement on the side of a milk carton.”