Season 3 Episode 21: Life’s a Beach

May 21, 1989

Published 05/21/89

Steve and Marcy have a tradition of going to the beach on the first sunny day in May, and the Bundys decide to do the same, which is how a family with no aptitude for leisure ends up spending a day on the shore of Lake Michigan. The episode is structured as a series of small catastrophes rather than one plot, which suits it: this is a family outing, and family outings do not have arcs.

The beach gives the series somewhere to put all four Bundys plus both Rhoades outdoors and in swimwear, which it had not done since the Florida two-parter, and the contrast between the two households is at its sharpest. Steve and Marcy have a tradition, a plan and a named car: the Mercedes is Klaus. The Bundys have a cooler and Al, who destroys a child’s sandcastle without noticing.

The episode’s most-discussed moment is a line of Kelly’s. Peggy, investigating an envelope of Steve’s for money, prompts Kelly to express hope about what is inside, and she misremembers the slang term for a ten-dollar bill in a direction the censors could not accept. The line was cut from the original syndication prints and survives on the DVD and in later streaming versions.

It also quietly establishes something about the parents. Al and Peggy did not know that Kelly’s birthday had been the day before, and had to have it confirmed by their children, a failure the series ran again in season seven’s “Movie Show.” Michael Faustino, David’s younger brother, appears again as one of the children on the beach; Vanessa Cherié Guarnera, a beach girl here, turned up eight seasons later in “Live Nude Peg.”