Season 3 Episode 16: The House That Peg Lost

April 9, 1989

Published 04/09/89

Steve and Marcy go on holiday and ask Al and Peggy to house-sit, which given what happened in the previous episode is a remarkable act of faith. The Bundys loot the place, naturally, Al is still carrying the VCR he stole last week, but the real disaster is larger. A moving man turns up looking for a roadhouse, and takes the Rhoades’ house away. Al’s eventual report to the returning couple is that their home is now a chicken restaurant in Waukegan, an actual suburb twenty-four miles north of Chicago.

It is one of the most purely absurd premises the series ever committed to, and it works because nobody treats it as impossible. The house is gone; the paperwork was wrong; Al is not especially troubled. The episode’s attitude is that this is the kind of thing that happens to people who leave the Bundys in charge.

Kelly’s slumber party runs alongside, with Bud confined to his room, and the episode logs the boys Kelly has taken from her own friends by name: Dan Peterson, Greg Barnett and Bobby Brucato. Kelly confirms she is sixteen.

The looting turns up two durable pieces of Rhoades financial intelligence. Al and Peggy establish that the house is in Marcy’s name alone, and that Steve’s mother is the sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy, which Marcy had valued at a million dollars a few episodes earlier in “Requiem for a Dead Barber.” Peggy also produces a promissory note for sex that Al had signed, confirms the year as 1989, and observes that it is the year of the snake. She is probably not talking about the Chinese zodiac, though 1989 was in fact the year of the snake.