Season 5 Episode 20: Top of the Heap

Original air date: April 7, 1991
Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 20
Milestone: the 100th episode of Married with Children
Written by: Ron Leavitt and Arthur Silver
Directed by: Gerry Cohen

April 7, 1991

Published 04/07/91

The hundredth episode of Married… with Children, and Al Bundy is in it for about a minute. The half-hour belongs to Charlie Verducci, Al’s divorced and unemployed friend, and his dim-witted teenage son Vinnie, who are attempting to improve their circumstances by every means except work. Joseph Bologna plays Charlie and Matt LeBlanc plays Vinnie, three years before Friends.

It is a backdoor pilot, and the spin-off got made: Top of the Heap ran on FOX in 1991 for seven episodes. Katey Sagal, Amanda Bearse, Ted McGinley, Christina Applegate and David Faustino are all absent, which makes this the only episode of the series without a single one of them, and Al’s appearance is a cameo rather than a part.

Spending the hundredth episode this way was an unusual decision. The milestone matters commercially: a hundred episodes is roughly the threshold at which a series becomes viable in syndication, which this one went on to do very profitably, and the producers used it to launch something else instead of celebrating. Viewers have not been generous about it: by IMDb’s ratings it is the lowest-rated episode of the entire run.

It also explains a gap on this site. Amazon’s catalogue does not carry the episode, because it belongs to the spin-off’s rights rather than the parent series, which is why there is no streaming card on this page and why the Watching It section below says what it does.

Joey Lauren Adams plays Mona and returned to the parent series twice, as Cousin Effie and as Janey. Diana Bellamy, as Kathleen, had been Nancy in season one. The Verduccis’ apartment set was recycled from 227, where it belonged to a history teacher.