Season 1 Episode 5: Have You Driven a Ford Lately

May 3, 1987

Published 05/03/87

Al and Steve buy a 1965 Mustang and set about restoring it, and for the length of the project the two of them get on better than at any other point in the series. That is the episode’s real subject. Al has no friends and Steve has no interests, and a car in a garage gives both of them somewhere to be that is not their own living room. The restoration is total, consuming and badly executed, and it takes over their lives at the expense of everything else.

Peggy and Marcy find their own common ground in resenting it, which is the first time the series pairs the two women against the two men as a bloc rather than as individual grievances. The arrangement would become one of the show’s standard configurations for the next decade: two couples, four people, and the fault line running between the garage and the house rather than between the households.

The episode is best remembered for Al’s dream sequence, in which the Mustang appears in a fantasy of escape, the open road, no family, no shoe store. The licence plate on the car in that dream is Illinois F3B 359, and the following week’s episode quietly reveals that this is in fact Peggy’s plate, which is a very funny thing to do to a man’s fantasy a week after showing it. Ed O’Neill has said that during rehearsal for the scene where Al is led back into the house after being stun-gunned, creators Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt laughed hard enough to end up on the floor.