Season 2 Episode 20: Just Married… with Children

March 6, 1988

Published 03/06/88

Al and Peggy want onto a game show called How Do I Love Thee?, which tests how well couples know each other and humiliates them for it, and the only way in is to apply as Steve and Marcy Rhoades. They do. What they do not know is that Steve and Marcy have had the same idea in reverse and applied as Al and Peg Bundy, which means both couples arrive at the studio under each other’s names and have to compete anyway.

It is the best-constructed episode of the second season and one of the most purely farcical the series ever made. The premise commits both couples to maintaining a lie in front of a studio audience and a host who has no interest in helping, and the questions are designed to expose exactly the things each pair is pretending about. Geoff Pierson plays the host, Roland Squab, with precisely the right note of sadism; he went on to lead Unhappily Ever After, the sitcom created by this show’s own Ron Leavitt, playing a character built along much the same lines as Al Bundy.

The episode also establishes the two marriages’ relative ages on the record: Steve and Marcy at thirteen months, Al and Peggy at sixteen years. Both figures line up with what the series had already shown, the Bundys’ sixteenth anniversary in season one, the Rhoades’ first a few episodes earlier in “Peggy Loves Al, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.”

The series returned to this format once more, nine years later, in season eleven’s “Breaking Up Is Easy to Do,” where a board game asks the same kind of questions and Al fails them badly. He performs considerably better here. Catherine Rusoff, who plays Mona Squab, is Ed O’Neill’s wife.