Season 2 Episode 17: Peggy Loves Al, Yeah Yeah, Yeah

February 14, 1988

Published 02/14/88

The series’ Valentine’s Day episode, broadcast on Valentine’s Day, and the most unusual half-hour Married… with Children ever produced. Four plots run at once: Bud is expecting his first valentine and suspects Kelly has engineered it as a prank, Kelly has to choose one boy from a field of applicants, Steve is planning to take Marcy to Hawaii for their first wedding anniversary, and Peggy wants Al to say that he loves her. He will not.

The last of those was not resolved by the script. The episode went out live, and viewers telephoned in during the broadcast to vote on whether Al should say it, which makes this the only episode of the series whose ending was decided by the audience while it was airing. Peggy’s appeal to the voters is a speech about socks, toenail clippings and what is living in her husband’s toothbrush, delivered straight to camera on the grounds that anyone who has lived with the man will understand what she is owed.

The production reflects the occasion. It is one of only two episodes to run the creator, writer and director credits at the top instead of the end, the other being the pilot, and the original broadcast carried no closing credits at all: there was no time.

The title is also a count. Al says “Yeah, yeah, yeah” to Peggy three times across the half-hour: once when she says good morning while he is drinking from the milk carton, once when she tells him she loves him and he changes the subject to the Bulls and the Pistons, and once when she threatens to withhold sex and assures him she has no difficulty saying it herself.