What Happened to Seven From ‘Married… with Children’?

Like The Brady Bunch’s Cousin Oliver, Married… With Children’s Seven marked an ill-advised effort to bring cute, youthful energy into an aging sitcom. And like Cousin Oliver, no one was particularly happy to see him.

Played by Shane Sweet, Seven made his entrance, appropriately enough, in the Fox sitcom’s seventh-season premiere, “Magnificent Seven.” In that 1992 episode, Peggy’s cousin Zemus (Bobcat Goldthwait) and his wife, Ida Mae (Linda Blair), ditch Seven at the Bundys’ home. Peggy (Katey Sagal) takes a liking to the kid, and Seven becomes part of the family … until he vanishes midway through the season without explanation.

“Seven was a thorough bad idea for the 1992-1993 season of the show that never worked and is best forgotten, which is what Married… With Children did this past season,” Richard K. Schull, the “TV Answer Man,” wrote in a 1994 newspaper column.

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But some viewers couldn’t forget, much as they might have wanted to. Just months ago, a Reddit user asked what happened to Seven.

“He was Oliver then was Chuck Cunningham’ed,” one commenter replied, referencing the Happy Days character who also vanished without a trace.

(Another commenter dismissed the character more bluntly, writing, “F*** [Seven]. He’s a waste of time.”

Married… With Children did, at least, acknowledge Seven’s M.I.A. status in Season 8, when the character appears as a missing child on a milk carton.

Seven was written out of the show because actor Shane Sweet was fired, David Faustino revealed

David Faustino, the Married… With Children actor behind Bud Bundy, gave fans an explanation for Seven’s disappearance in a 2019 appearance at Comic Con Baltics. When Faustino first brought up the character in that convention chat, audience members booed.

“Exactly,” Faustino responded. “It was awful. It was the worst mistake they ever made. 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.’ [And the] kid’s just like, ‘Ahhhh.’ Like, he had no f***ing clue what he was doing. So consequently, he got fired. It’s a cold business out there. I don’t care if you’re 5 — you’re getting fired.”

Amanda Bearse, who played neighbor Marcy Rhoades on the show, spoke critically about Seven’s addition, too. “That’s when we jump the shark,” she said on the Married With Children Podcast, in 2017, explaining that the casting came after co-creators Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt stopped working together and Moye left the production.

“We were lucky to have Ron and Michael for as long as we did as a writing team, but they divorced as writers, so Daddy and Daddy broke up,” Bearse said. “And so when that happens, things do shift, and part of that shift was Season 7. And any time you bring in a kid, it’s not a good sign.”

Bearse contended that there was “still a lot of good in Season 7,” but she admitted that Seven wasn’t the best creative choice and that Sweet wasn’t the best casting choice. “We knew it didn’t really gel,” she said. “And no offense — he’s just a young guy, a young, little guy — it just wasn’t the right vibe.”

Sweet continued working in Hollywood — in front of and behind the camera.

Sweet continued acting on screen throughout the 1990s and 2000s, taking a supporting role in the Nickelodeon sci-fi drama The Journey of Allen Strange, for example. More recently, he’s been working behind the scenes, proving ADR lines and additional voices for the films Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Borderlands, and The Substance.

And Sweet discussed his Married… With Children era in a 2008 interview published on the Insane Plan blog. “My experience with MWC was awesome,” he said. “I was working with very intelligent people who understood comedy. I probably learned more just by being around them and seeing them go through their rehearsal processes than I realize.”

He added: “MWC was big because I had actually set my sights on it. We drove by their stage anytime we would go into Hollywood, and I’d always say I wanted to work on it. Plus, it was my first big role, so that was cool.”