Season 10 Episode 14: The Hood, the Bud and the Kelly (1)

January 7, 1996

Published 01/07/96

Two plots run on separate levels of the house and the episode gets most of its comedy from refusing to let them meet. On the roof, Al and Jefferson have decided to install a satellite dish themselves rather than pay someone who knows how, and they spend the half-hour falling off. Below them, Bud has been fired as Kelly’s agent: she found out the lingerie commercial he booked was for adult incontinence products, and he needs her back or he will have to find real employment.

Jefferson’s advice, delivered in the back yard while Al dangles from the gutter screaming for help a few feet away, is that a modern agent has to create his own project. What he suggests is a workout video full of attractive women jumping up and down, which Bud immediately adopts, and the scene is the best thing in the episode: Al’s cries for help escalate from his legs to his chin while two men calmly discuss the fitness video market, and neither of them so much as glances over. He hits the patio as Bud leaves to arrange financing.

The financing is where the two-parter gets its title. Every bank turns Bud down: Marcy, it emerges, made certain of that personally, so he borrows from the mob instead, which puts a deadline and a threat on a project he has no idea how to execute. The episode also introduces Ariel, Bud’s girlfriend and the first of three appearances for Jennifer Lyons, and finds time for Lucky to announce that he has left Bud’s representation for the William Morris Agency.