Season 1 Episode 10: Al Loses His Cherry

June 7, 1987

Published 06/07/87

Al walks out after a fight with Peggy and stays at the apartment of his shoe store colleague Luke Ventura, who lives the life Al is assumed to envy. Two sisters turn up. Luke takes one of them to bed. The other spends the rest of the episode working on Al, and the episode’s whole weight rests on what he does about it, which is nothing. He does not go into the other room.

That refusal is the point, and it is a surprisingly firm piece of character-building for episode ten of a series whose protagonist spent the next decade claiming to want exactly this. The show would go on to build hundreds of jokes on Al’s frustration, his magazines, his trips to the nudie bar and his loathing of his marriage, and it established here, early and without comment, that when the opportunity is actually in front of him he declines it. The series never retracted that, and it is the reason the character stayed likeable through eleven years of appalling behaviour.

This is Luke Ventura’s last appearance, though the series checked in on him years later: season nine’s “Pump Fiction” reveals he has become Salesman of the Month at a major Chicago shoe department, which is about as pointed a comparison with Al as the show ever drew. The episode also contains the first of only a handful of times anyone says the show’s own title out loud, with Al describing himself as married with children. A small piece of casting trivia: Jerry Hall, who plays Terry Cherry, has a real-life twin sister named Terry.