Season 2 Episode 16: Master the Possibilities

February 7, 1988

Published 02/07/88

Al receives a box of “Yodelin’ Andy” records he never ordered, and Marcy supplies the piece of information that drives the whole episode: if something arrives in the mail unsolicited, you are legally entitled to keep it. Al takes this and runs with it considerably further than the law intends. A credit card arrives addressed to Buck, which by Marcy’s rule is now the household’s property, and the Bundys go shopping on it.

What follows is the purest expression of the show’s early economics. Given unlimited credit and no accountability, the family does not buy sensibly or extravagantly: they buy appliances, furniture and exercise equipment, the ordinary comforts of a household that has never had any. The episode is funny because the spree is so modest in ambition and so total in execution.

There is a wonderful production footnote to all of it. The series was working on a very small budget in its first two seasons, and every large item the Bundys acquire on Buck’s credit card was borrowed from the homes of the show’s own cast and crew. The furniture on screen is the furniture the people making it owned.

The episode also supplied one of the show’s most-seen images: Bud on the new exercise machine, laughing about everything Kelly is missing, which ran in the opening credits of the American syndicated prints of seasons one and two. Kelly herself does not appear: Bud reports she is out with two boys, and Peggy later places her at Grandma Wanker’s. Peggy uses Pig Latin again, this time to discuss Bud in front of him, a trick she had used on her mother in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”