Season 2 Episode 3: If I Were a Rich Man

October 4, 1987

Published 10/04/87

Steve’s bank comes up a million dollars short the morning after he and Al spent an evening in its vault, and everyone draws the obvious conclusion: Al took it. Steve believes it. So does Peggy, and so do the children, and the Bundy response to the news that the head of the household is a felon is immediate, uncomplicated delight: they are rich. The episode spends its length on how a family behaves when it believes money has arrived, and the answer is that nobody asks a single question about where it came from.

What makes it work is that Al’s innocence is never really the subject. The suspicion is reasonable, his family’s eagerness to believe it is entirely in character, and the comedy comes from how little any of them care whether it is true. For a series three episodes into its second season, that is a confident piece of writing: it assumes the audience already knows these people well enough to find their reaction funny rather than shocking.

The episode is also the first to show Steve’s workplace, which the series had kept offstage through the whole first season, and it ties off a piece of business left hanging from the first-season finale. In “Johnny Be Gone,” Marcy’s dinner party for the Takahashi brothers was a bid for a managerial post at Kyoto National Bank, which would free up her old job for Steve. This episode confirms both halves happened: Marcy got the promotion, and Steve has her former position at The Leading Bank of Chicago.