Season 2 Episode 13: You Better Watch Out

December 20, 1987

Published 12/20/87

The series’ first Christmas episode opens with an on-screen content warning, which tells you most of what you need to know. A parachuting mall Santa, employed by the rival Lakeside Mall, mentioned here for the first time, crash-lands fatally in the Bundys’ back yard on Christmas Eve, and the neighbourhood children begin arriving to ask questions. The Bundys then have to manage a body, a coroner and a group of small children who want to know where Santa is.

It is one of the darkest premises any network sitcom attempted in the 1980s and the episode plays it almost entirely straight, which is why it works. The children are not told a comforting lie so much as handed a series of increasingly strained improvisations, and the adults’ priority throughout is the inconvenience rather than the tragedy. Ed O’Neill can be seen visibly fighting to hold character after the landing.

David Faustino has named this one of his favourite episodes on several occasions, including in the ninth-season retrospective and FOX’s twenty-fifth anniversary special. Two of the neighbourhood children have connections to the production: Nestor is played by Michael Faustino, David’s younger brother, and Carl by Edan Gross, who returned the following season to play a young Al Bundy in “He Thought He Could.” Mike Hagerty, the coroner, appeared alongside Ed O’Neill in Wayne’s World five years later.

What keeps the half-hour from curdling is that nobody in the house is cruel about it: they are simply unequipped. The Bundys have no vocabulary for comforting children, their own included, and the arrival of a group of them asking an unanswerable question exposes that completely. The coroner’s matter-of-factness supplies the other half of the joke, treating a dead Santa in a suburban back yard as an ordinary call-out on a Tuesday.