Season 9 Episode 8: Sleepless in Chicago

October 23, 1994

Published 10/23/94

Al and Jefferson go to an auction, where Al wins the first ever issue of Big ‘Uns and Jefferson picks up a nurse Barbie for Marcy. Jefferson then learns that the doll is worth fifty thousand dollars to a collector who was at the same auction, and the problem is that Marcy has not put it down since he handed it to her. She sleeps holding it. So Jefferson comes to Al with a request, which he phrases badly and then has to clarify: he needs Al to lie down next to Marcy in the dark long enough for Jefferson to swap the valuable doll for an ordinary one. Al agrees, which puts him in the Darcys’ bed in his pyjamas, and the episode plays the whole sequence as a heist. Peg, meanwhile, notices her husband is missing and becomes genuinely worried. The other half belongs to Kelly, who has been chosen to record a public service announcement and has decided to do it as a brunette, on the theory that blondes are not taken seriously. Her explanation of the stereotype she is trying to escape contains the single best malapropism of the ninth season. The series had done a Barbie retrieval plot before, in season 2’s “Guys and Dolls.”

The favour Jefferson needs is the engine, and the show lets him take an unreasonably long time to say it out loud. Al’s willingness to consider it is entirely contingent on the magazine he has just won and has not yet paid for, which gives Jefferson the only leverage anyone in this arrangement has ever had over him. Kelly’s parallel story, going brunette to be taken seriously for a public service announcement, gets the episode’s opening scene and one of the better extended bits of Al refusing to notice his own daughter.

Episode Facts

Original air date: October 23, 1994
Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 8
Overall episode number: 191
Written and directed by: Katherine Green
Production note: Jefferson’s middle name is given here as Milhous.
Production note: The shot of Jefferson shutting the Bundy front door on Marcy was used for Ted McGinley’s clip in the season 10 opening credits.
Title note: A play on Sleepless in Seattle.