Ted Mcginley Says Penny Residual Checks Add Up to $2

ted mcginley says the residual checks from his old TV work have shrunk to one penny apiece, and he has enough of them to make the pile feel almost symbolic. The actor, who found fame on Married... with Children, Happy Days, and The Love Boat, said the stack is probably worth about $2.

McGinley’s penny stack

“I’ve been getting residuals all the time,” McGinley said in a new interview with Page Six. He said the checks keep getting smaller as the years go by, but he does not cash them.

He also said he cannot bring himself to throw them away. That leaves him with a stack of checks that may look more like paperwork than income, even after a career that stretched across the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and included an eight-season run on Married... with Children.

Jodie Sweetin on streaming

Jodie Sweetin described the same problem in even starker terms earlier this year on the McBride Rewind podcast, saying she “got a one-cent check the other day.” She tied the math to the way television now moves through streaming instead of old-school syndication.

“There’s no syndication anymore because it’s all in streaming,” Sweetin said. “Who gets paid for that? Nobody gets paid for that,” she added, before saying, “Sure, in my 20s, there would be money, but not reliable,” and adding, “You don’t know how much it’s going to be or how often they’re going to run the show. So, sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, cool. That was nice.’ Then sometimes you’re like, ‘All right, well, there’s a nice dinner out.’”

Old residuals, new math

The issue is not that these actors stopped earning residuals; it is that the checks can now be so small they become more of a ledger entry than a paycheck. For anyone trying to understand the business side of older TV work, McGinley’s $2 estimate and Sweetin’s one-cent check show how thin the money can get once a show’s long tail is spread across modern viewing habits.

That makes the practical takeaway blunt: actors with older credits may still get paid, but in some cases the payment is too small to matter until it accumulates across many checks. McGinley’s pile is the clearest example here — a career that once meant steady TV visibility now produces pennies, not the kind of residual stream that can support a household on its own.