Season 2 Episode 6: Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Part 2

October 18, 1987

Published 10/18/87

The consequences arrive. Al works out that Peggy has been spending her evenings, and his money, at a male strip club, and Marcy has a more immediate problem: her wedding ring is somewhere she cannot explain to Steve, and she cannot bring herself to tell him where. The episode runs on that concealment until the dancer she spent the evening with turns up at the D’Arcys’ front door, which removes the question of whether she will confess.

It is a better episode than part one because it has something at stake. The first half was about permission; this one is about what the two marriages do with the information. Al’s grievance is financial before it is anything else, which is entirely in character: the money bothers him more than the dancers do. Steve’s reaction is the one the series would keep returning to: wounded, decent, and completely outmatched by his own wife’s capacity for deflection.

The episode is also the first time Al mentions Tang by name, the powdered drink that became a permanent fixture of the Bundy kitchen. The first season had used it with the label altered to read Tri-C; the actual bottle does not appear on screen until a few episodes later, in “Im-Po-Dent,” when Al demonstrates to the children how to make a Tang Wipe. One of Billy Hufsey’s Fame co-stars, Jesse Borrego, turned up on this series the following season as Bruno, the Polk High janitor Kelly takes an interest in.

What the two-parter leaves behind is a working template. Give the women a night out and the men an excuse, run both halves in parallel, and let the lies collide in the last act. The series reused the structure for a decade, usually with the Jiggly Room standing in for the club, and almost always with Marcy’s dignity as the main casualty.