Season 2 Episode 11: How Do You Spell Revenge?

November 22, 1987

Published 11/22/87

Al, Peggy and Bud play for the New Market Mallers, a softball team made up of mall employees competing against teams from other malls, and the Mallers are losing. Al’s diagnosis is Peggy, and his solution is an ultimatum: improve or leave the team. The episode is one of the earliest and clearest statements of how Al’s competitive streak operates: he has no realistic prospect of winning anything, and he will still cut his own wife from the roster to improve the odds.

The softball team was a good invention and the show knew it, bringing the Mallers back three seasons later for “The Unnatural.” The appeal is the uniforms and the organisational seriousness: these are people with no athletic ability whatsoever treating a mall league as a competitive venture. A detail that has delighted viewers for decades: the N in “New” on Al’s jersey is sewn on backwards, and nobody fixed it.

Kelly’s parallel plot has her attempting to get a tattoo, which the episode treats as a transgression requiring parental intervention, amusing in hindsight, since Christina Applegate’s own ankle tattoos become plainly visible in later seasons, including in season eleven’s “Kelly’s Gotta Habit.” Steve, Marcy and Buck are all absent, leaving the half-hour to the four Bundys and the team. Kris Kamm, playing Brian, Kelly’s fifteen-year-old boyfriend, was about twenty-three at the time, and only fourteen years younger than the actor playing his father.

Underneath the softball is the series’ clearest early statement about Al’s relationship to competition. He is not good at the game and his team is not going to win the mall league, and he still conducts the roster decision with the gravity of a man managing a franchise. The ultimatum to Peggy is delivered seriously, received seriously, and resolved on athletic rather than marital grounds, which is funnier than any amount of arguing about it would have been.