Season 5 Episode 16: All Night Security Dude

February 24, 1991

Published 02/24/91

Al Bundy’s four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High are the load-bearing wall of his entire personality, so an episode built around the trophy that commemorates them was always going to be one of the good ones. “All Night Security Dude” starts with Al taking a second job as an overnight security guard at the high school, a position he treats with far more ceremony than it deserves. He patrols the empty halls like a man on the beat, soundtracked by the Peter Gunn theme, and he sings to himself in the bathroom. It is in the bathroom that the disaster happens. While Al is in there, someone walks off with the school’s prized football trophy, and because Al was the only person on duty, Al is the one who gets fired for it. The firing itself is staged as a shot by shot parody of the opening credits of the 1960s western Branded, complete with the buttons being torn off his shirt and his night stick broken over the principal’s knee. Humiliated and unemployed again, Al sets out to recover the trophy himself, and the trail leads to Spare Tire Dixon, the rival lineman he beat on the goal line in the city championship almost twenty years earlier. Dixon has been nursing that loss ever since, and he has a theory about how it ruined his life that involves pie. What follows is two middle-aged men relitigating one high school football play in an empty gymnasium, and it is both very funny and unexpectedly sad. Ed O’Neill has named this one among his own favorite episodes of the series.

Episode Facts

Original air date: February 24, 1991
Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 16
Overall episode number: 96
Written by: Glen Eichler and Peter Gaffney
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: February 8, 1991
Production note: Ed O’Neill named this one of his favorite episodes in the 1995 retrospective special My Favorite Married.
Title note: The title borrows from a fictional Erik Estrada series that Peg lists among the new fall shows back in “We’ll Follow the Sun.”