Grounded for Life

Grounded for Life is an American television sitcom that debuted on January 10, 2001, as a mid-season replacement on Fox. Created by Mike Schiff and Bill Martin, it ran for two seasons on the network until being canceled only two episodes into its third season. It was immediately picked up for the rest of the third season by the WB, where it aired for two additional seasons until the series ended on January 28, 2005. The show starred Donal Logue and Megyn Price as Sean and Claudia Finnerty, an Irish Catholic couple living on Staten Island, New York, with their three children: Lily (Lynsey Bartilson), Jimmy (Griffin Frazen), and Henry (Jake Burbage). The show also stars Kevin Corrigan, Bret Harrison, and Richard Riehle. The show has featured guest stars such as Ashton Kutcher, Danny Masterson, Mila Kunis, Wilmer Valderrama (cast of That '70s Show), Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Scott Thompson (cast of The Kids in the Hall), Mike Vogel, Natasha Lyonne, Vincent Pastore, Miriam Flynn, Stephen Root, and Elizabeth Berridge (Kevin Corrigan's real-life wife). Premise The show, set in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Staten Island, New York, is about the comedic interplay of the Irish-American Catholic Finnerty family. One of the show's central aspects is that Sean and Claudia Finnerty had their first child and got married when they were 18 years old. Thus, although their most senior is a teenage daughter, the parents are relatively young and not complete with their "wild" years. (In an episode where Sean goes to fetch Lily from the police station and is mistaken for her drug dealer, his father quips, "That's what happens when you're 18 and don't know what a rubber is!") The show features an unusual style of storytelling, often starting with a scene at the end of the story or sometimes in the middle and filling in the gaps with flashbacks. Its main concepts are an Irish/Italian Catholic family with one daughter and two sons, surviving endless catastrophes, and utilizing flashbacks to explain each current situation further. The opening sequence is set to a guitar theme, performed by the band Ween, that also serves as the music between scenes. The first sequence, used for the first 11 episodes of season 1, showed the family playing basketball. The twelfth episode ("Jimmy Was Kung-Fu Fighting") onwards showed a mix of scenes from Season 1. The sequence was updated each year to include scenes from the current season.