Ed O'Neillsky?

I have always admired Ed O'Neill, primarily because his name is so cool. And I always suspected that he was capable of more than yuk yuk, although I confess I rarely watched him when he was doing Dragnet. My loss.

Yet his most famous role has been recreated...on Russian TV. Dethroner links to this.

Turn on the sitcom that is the hottest television show in Russia, and it all seems so familiar. Moored to his living room couch is a shoe salesman who is more interested in watching sports than conjugal relations. His wife has shocking hair and an even more shocking mouth. A couple of ne’er-do-well teenagers round out this bawdy, bickering bunch.

In fact, the show is an authorized copy of the American sitcom “Married With Children,” with a Russian cast and dialogue but scripts that hew closely to those of the original. This knockoff is such a sensation, especially among younger viewers, that its actors have become household names, and advertisements for its new season are plastered around Moscow....

“ ‘Married With Children,’ with its satire on the American middle class, fits the style of our channel well,” said Dmitri Troitsky, a senior executive at the Russian channel TNT, a Gazprom-owned network whose programming bent is roughly similar to that of the Fox network in the United States. “It seemed interesting and topical for us to do a parody on the Russian middle class.”

Now, talking about cool names - if the TNT guy had been a TV executive, say, twenty years ago, do you think he would have changed his name from "Troitsky"?

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