Season 2 Episode 18: The Great Escape

February 21, 1988

Published 02/21/88

Kelly is grounded over her grades, and because the house is being fumigated for termites, the entire family has to spend the period at Gary’s Shoes. This puts a teenager under her father’s direct supervision in a shoe store for the duration, with a concert she intends to attend, and the episode becomes an escape picture conducted around the stockroom.

It is one of the better early uses of the shoe store as something other than a place where Al suffers. With the family installed in it the location has to work as a set rather than a punchline, and the episode fills it out considerably: a rival establishment called Morty’s Shoes operating in the same mall, an aerobics studio next door supplying customers, and the beginnings of the store’s own small ecosystem. Season five’s “All Night Security Dude” later relocated that studio to the floor above.

The half-hour also introduces Jade, the strikingly attractive woman who walks in and talks to Al, a recurring figure across the next four seasons in three further episodes. Kelly establishes that she is in the tenth grade, and the episode reveals that Bud is known to the Polk High football team as the Masked Lover Lane Peeper and wanted accordingly.

There is a nice piece of scheduling trivia attached: the episode aired the same night Christina Applegate guest-starred on FOX’s 21 Jump Street, playing a teenager in a rehabilitation programme, meaning she was on the network twice in one evening in two very different registers. Cliff Bemis, the termite boss here, returned nine seasons later to play Al’s father in a flashback.