Season 4 Episode 8: 976-SHOE

November 12, 1989

Published 11/12/89

Al’s business idea is a telephone helpline for shoe problems, and he needs fifty thousand dollars to start it. Steve, who is chasing a sales contest with a trip to Hawaii as the prize, signs off on the loan and tells Al to do the paperwork later. That decision is the hinge of the whole episode, and it goes wrong faster than anyone involved anticipates.

Nobody calls the hotline. Al sits at the kitchen table surrounded by telephones, answering handsets that are not ringing, while his family stands over him explaining the problem with his premise. Marcy then lends Al the money to repay Steve’s bank so Steve will not be fired, and Al spends that too. By the trial scene at the end, Steve has lost his job at The Leading Bank of Chicago and Marcy has been demoted from loan officer to drive-up teller.

It is worth watching for the Steve material specifically. David Garrison plays most of the second half in a catatonic state on the Bundy couch, staring at nothing, having asked his wife not to shout at him about the loan until midnight. Marcy’s response when she finds him like that is the funniest line in the episode and the clearest sign of how far the Rhoades had been dragged in by this point. The other thing this episode establishes is the cost of being neighbours with the Bundys. Up to this point Steve and Marcy have lost a dog, a VCR, a house, a Barbie doll and most of their dignity. Here they lose their careers. Marcy spends the rest of the series several rungs lower than she started, and Steve is gone from the regular cast inside two seasons.