I'll See You in Court - Production and Controversy

Production and Controversy

The episode was written by Jeanne Baruch and Jeanne Romano, both newcomers to Married... with Children. Directed by Gerry Cohen, the show was taped on January 6, 1989, with a planned airing date of February 19 of the same year. The censors of the Fox Broadcasting Company, however, objected to many of the lines in the show. It was not the first time that Fox censors had struggled with the content in Married... with Children. Earlier in the season, producers and writers Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt had to fight with the censors to air "The Camping Show", an episode where the Bundys and the Rhodes are trapped in a cabin in the wilderness as all three women have their periods at the same time. It was originally intended to be shown in November 1988, but its airing was delayed while the network wrangled with the subject matter. The episode aired on December 11, 1988, but the producers were forced to change the title from "A Period Piece" to "The Camping Show", despite the fact that the title itself does not appear onscreen and is not mentioned during the program.

The censors ended up pulling "I'll See You in Court", preventing it from airing in the United States during the series' original run. Terry Rakolta, a woman from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, had launched a letter-writing campaign against the program after viewing the Season 3 episode "Her Cups Runneth Over" in January 1989. Offended by the episode's content, she urged advertisers to boycott the show, several of whom did or pledged to more carefully screen the episodes for which they provided advertising. The campaign garnered more media attention than she had expected and the advertisers' more careful scrutiny of the individual episodes that they supported was a significant factor that led to the pulling of I'll See You in Court. Contributing to this was that the overall topic, sex, was not seen as a topic to be vocally and openly discussed on television.

In an interview with Playboy magazine, Michael Moye claimed that the producers dubbed the episode "The Lost Episode" both because it never aired and because they felt that they lost control of the project. A typical episode of Married... with Children contained two or three censor notes denoting content that was "too graphic" or "over the edge.", whereas "I'll See You in Court" contained a total of 15. After arguing with the censors and conceding all but four of the notes, Fox still refused to air the episode. Moye claims that the final total of 13 changes was unacceptable because "he integrity of the show was shot to hell."

The episode did, however, premiere in other parts of the world in 1990. On June 18, 2002, the FX network broadcast the episode for the first time on American television. The episode, however, was still not shown in its entirety, as the network cut four lines during the scene where the two families decide on what to do about the videotapes:

Although the episode has aired in Australia, Europe, and Canada unedited, the above omission means that the show has never been broadcast in the United States in its entirety. The total time between when the episode was taped and when it premiered in the United States was 13 years, 5 months, and 12 days.