Season 2 Episode 14: Guys and Dolls

January 10, 1988

Published 01/10/88

Al and Steve decide to start a baseball card collection and raise the capital by selling Marcy’s childhood Barbie doll, which she has kept in its original box for twenty years. The problem announces itself immediately: she notices, and the two of them have to retrieve it. The shop they sold it to has since been robbed, which turns the back half of the episode into a search through downtown Chicago, asking everybody they meet about a doll.

The structure is a small-scale caper and it suits the Al-and-Steve pairing better than almost anything else the series gave them. Neither man is competent, both are motivated entirely by fear of their wives, and the task is absurd. Marcy’s attachment to the doll is played as genuine rather than silly, and the series came back to it nine seasons later in “Sleepless in Chicago,” where another Barbie causes considerably more trouble.

There is a good piece of studio archaeology in the street scenes. As Al and Steve comb downtown Chicago, they walk through the exterior set built for 227, another Embassy Television production shooting on the same lot, a series co-created by this show’s own Michael G. Moye under the pseudonym C.J. Banks, and which employed a number of the same writers, directors and guest actors. Peggy, meanwhile, is seen playing with a piece of the 1978 A-Frame Barbie Dream House, and Steve’s naval uniform carries the rank of Seaman.

The episode also marks an early high point for the two husbands as a double act. Al and Steve spend eleven seasons being opposites, and the handful of episodes that put them on the same side of a problem, the Mustang, the poker game, this, are consistently among the first four seasons’ best. Neither of them considers simply telling Marcy the truth at any point, which is the only thing that would have worked.