Season 3 Episode 7: The Bald and the Beautiful

January 29, 1989

Published 01/29/89

Marcy leaves Steve a newspaper clipping about a baldness cure, which Steve takes as a diagnosis rather than a suggestion. Convinced he is going bald, he joins a club for bald and balding men and brings Al along, and the episode is built on two men confronting their hairlines in a room full of people further along than they are.

It is the first time the series addressed hair loss for either of them, and it dates the show precisely. Ed O’Neill’s hairline would recede visibly across the following seasons and the series eventually made it part of the furniture, but this early version is still treating it as a crisis rather than a fact. Al’s position throughout is that there is nothing wrong with him, delivered with increasing anxiety.

The half-hour is unusually generous with household detail. Al and Peggy’s sex night is established as Tuesday, and Peggy mentions that one of their standing rules is that the lights stay off. Al, flirting with two women in the shoe store, claims he would still be playing football if not for a bad knee, which the series later confirmed as the actual reason his career ended, meaning the boast is true for once. And he mentions missing playing pool, which pays off in season four’s “It’s a Bundyful Life,” where Peggy recalls him spending the previous Christmas at a pool table.

It is also one of the few episodes directed by someone other than the show’s regular rotation, with John Sgueglia taking the chair.