Season 2 Episode 5: Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Part 1

October 18, 1987

Published 10/18/87

Peggy invites Marcy out with the girls, and where they go is a male strip club, which, in 1987, on a network sitcom, was the kind of premise FOX had been built to allow. The men are occupied elsewhere: a repairwoman arrives to fix the Bundy refrigerator, and Al and Steve prove entirely unable to conduct themselves around her, which leaves the evening free. The episode splits cleanly in two and both halves are about the same thing, what each sex does with an unsupervised hour and no witnesses.

The club material gives Marcy her first real comic transformation. She arrives appalled, spends the evening insisting she is above it, and leaves having enjoyed herself considerably more than she will admit to anyone, which became one of the character’s most reliable patterns across eleven seasons. Peggy, by contrast, needs no persuading at any stage and no cover story afterwards. Billy Hufsey plays Zorro, the dancer who draws most of the attention; he had come straight off the final season of Fame, which finished five months before this aired.

The repairwoman half is the sharper joke of the two, because it inverts the premise before the episode has finished stating it. Al and Steve spend the evening behaving exactly as badly as the women they are about to be scandalised by, in their own kitchen, over a refrigerator.

The two-parter was not originally planned as one, the first draft was a single episode, which is why part one is largely setup and the consequences all land in part two. Writers Tracy Gamble and Richard Vaczy both had long careers downstream of it: Gamble went on to create 8 Simple Rules, in which Katey Sagal played the lead, and Vaczy later worked on Matrimonio con hijos, the Spanish-language remake of this series.