Season 4 Episode 1: Hot Off the Grill

September 3, 1989

Published 09/03/89

A Labor Day barbecue, and the fourth-season premiere runs the Bundy marriage backwards. Peggy does housework, actual, visible housework, outdoors, in front of her husband, and Al finds the sight of it genuinely arousing. For the rest of the half-hour he pursues her while she attempts to decline, which is the exact inversion of the dynamic the series had run for three years, and the episode gets considerable mileage out of Peggy being the one trying to get out of it.

By the end Al has succeeded four separate times: on the bench, by dragging her into the house, by calling her inside after the ashes get knocked over, and once more after that. It is the only episode of its kind until season eleven’s “The Stepford Peg,” and between them the two half-hours settle the question of what actually interests Al Bundy about his wife. It is her cooking or cleaning, which explains a great deal about the state of the marriage.

The ashes belong to Marcy’s aunt, which Steve and Marcy have brought to the barbecue, and Steve hated the woman. That plot exists mostly to produce the knocking-over, and it does its job.

The episode launches the fourth-season titles, with new introductory footage for all six cast members and a revised couch gag, same choreography, new clothes, that stayed in use until season ten’s “Requiem for a Dead Briard.” Its final frame became the end-credits still from “Peggy Turns 300” all the way through to season ten. Bud arrives without the mullet he wore all of season three, and the episode marks the first use of “Bad to the Bone” as Al’s anthem, which it remained for the rest of the run.