Season 4 Episode 12: It’s a Bundyful Life (2)
December 17, 1989
A drunken Marcy has left Al with no money and no way to buy the presents he promised, so he asks the obvious question, and a guardian angel arrives to answer it. The structure is It’s a Wonderful Life with the conclusion reversed: Al is shown what his family’s life would be like if he had never been born, and the answer is that they would all be considerably better off.
The alternate household is the best-remembered material in the fourth season. Peggy is a loving housewife who cooks, cleans and saved herself for marriage. Kelly is a college student publishing poetry in French and remaining a virgin on the grounds that pleasures of the flesh muddle the thinking. Bud is a bespectacled male feminist who would rather be friends with women than pursue them. And Norman Jablonski is head of the household, openly affectionate, and played by Ted McGinley, his first appearance on the series, two seasons before he returned as Jefferson D’Arcy.
Sam Kinison plays the angel, and the casting has a history: he had been the producers’ first choice to play Al Bundy, and was passed over for being too raunchy. He missed a day of rehearsal and apologised by sending the cast nightsticks, belly dancers and other gifts, Ted McGinley, who knew him from a comedy workshop, has told the fuller version of the story. The cast named him one of their favourite guests in the tenth-season retrospective. Kinison died in a head-on collision in April 1992, about two and a half years after this aired.
Despite proving the premise, the episode lets Al choose to exist anyway, which is the only ending the series would have allowed.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: December 17, 1989, the same night as part one
- Season 4, Episode 12, and the 69th episode of the series
- Written by Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
- Directed by Gerry Cohen
Guest Cast
- Sam Kinison as the guardian angel
- Ted McGinley as Norman Jablonsky
The World Is Better Without Al Bundy
Al cannot get his Christmas money out of the bank, and a guardian angel turns up to show him the world as it would be if he had never been born. The joke is that It’s a Wonderful Life runs backwards here. Peggy is a competent and loving homemaker who cooks. Bud is a male feminist. Kelly is a college poetry student published in French. Norman Jablonsky is the happy head of the household. Everybody is doing fine.
Al watches all of it and goes back anyway, which is the whole point and is a harder ending than the film it is parodying. The angel, who spends his screen time recounting his own miserable life and his suicide, is Sam Kinison, and this is the performance the cast picked as their favorite guest turn when they were asked in the season 10 clip special. Kinison had been the producers’ first choice to play Al Bundy and was ruled too raunchy for the part.
It is also Ted McGinley’s first appearance on the series, as Norman. He came back two seasons later as Jefferson D’Arcy in Married… With Who? and stayed to the end. Part one is here: It’s a Bundyful Life (1).
Famous Quotes
- Guardian Angel: “Boy, I tell ya, if they ever start using sex to get what they want, I’m outta here!” The angel’s read on women, delivered from the afterlife.
- Al: “Wait a second, she’s cooking. She told me she was allergic to fire.” Al, seeing the alternate Peggy.
- Al: “Why didn’t you let me in the bank, Marcy?” The grievance that starts the whole thing.
Notes
- Kinison missed a rehearsal for a dental emergency and then catered lunch for the whole cast, belly dancers included. Ted McGinley remembered him bringing a boombox the next day to play his newest album over lunch.
- Sam Kinison died in a head-on car accident in April 1992, at 38.
- The two-parter aired the same night The Simpsons premiered as a regular series with “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.”
- “Who’ll Stop the Rain” was filmed before this two-parter and aired after it.
- Kelly references the Thanksgiving episode “Fair Exchange,” and Mr. Donnelly appears after being mentioned in Tooth or Consequences and “976-SHOE.”
- Continuity snag: Kelly implies Grandma has died, but Bud sees her alive in season 6’s “The Mystery of Skull Island” and Al’s mother is on the phone in season 7’s “Al on the Rocks.”
- FOX re-aired both parts on December 15, 2003, the year of the reunion special.
- Goof: snow brushed out of Al’s hair reappears when he gets inside.
Part two of the Bundyful Life and this is where it gets real. Dad’s guardian angel shows him what the world looks like without Al Bundy in it. The Jablonskys (that’s us, but not us) are a perfect family. Happy, functional, probably eating dinner together like normal humans. And the Rhoades? Without Dad around to drag them down, they turned INTO the Bundys. Steve and Marcy became the neighborhood disasters. So basically Dad’s entire purpose in life was to absorb all the misery so everyone else could be slightly less miserable. That’s either the saddest thing I’ve ever heard or the most heroic. With the Bundys it’s usually both. Dad came back from that experience knowing the truth: we need him and he needs us. Even if none of us would ever admit it out loud.