Season 1 Episode 4: Whose Room is It Anyway?

Steve and Marcy have a tax refund and plan to add a room onto their house, which is all the opening the Bundys need. Al talks Steve into making it a pool room. Peggy and Marcy settle on an exercise room. The two couples then spend the half-hour negotiating, lobbying and betraying each other over a room neither Bundy will own or pay for, which is a fair summary of how the two households would operate for the next four seasons.

The episode is a bottle show: the entire thing plays out in the Bundy living room, with a limited cast and almost no sets, a format the series would return to for “Johnny Be Gone” at the end of the same season. The constraint works in its favour. With nowhere to go, the comedy has to come from four people arguing in one space, and the script keeps finding new alliances to break. Al’s own stated ambition is a room where he can relax and read the paper, which Peggy immediately and correctly identifies as a bathroom, a wish the series eventually granted him in season three’s “A Dump of My Own.”

Two running jokes start here. It is the first time Al expresses his distaste for the French, an opinion he would restate for a decade without ever explaining it. And it is the first time someone is heard falling down the basement stairs, in this case Al, off screen, which became one of the show’s most dependable sound effects. By production code this was the sixth episode made for the season, though it aired fourth.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: April 26, 1987
• Season 1, Episode 4, and the 4th episode of the series
• Written by Marcy Vosburgh and Sandy Sprung
• Directed by Zane Buzby
• No guest cast is credited. The entire episode runs on the four regulars plus the kids.

Whose Room is It Anyway?

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