Season 5 Episode 4: The Unnatural

October 14, 1990

Published 10/14/90

Al’s softball team reaches the championship and decides it would rather not have him in it. The vote to replace him is unanimous, which matters because his wife and both of his children have votes and use them. His replacement is better than he is in every measurable way, and the team is better off, and nobody pretends otherwise.

Then the replacement gets hurt, and Al goes in, and the episode gives him the moment it has spent twenty minutes denying him. His speech before crossing home plate is pitched as the big emotional payoff and is undercut by the fact that it is a neighbourhood softball league.

What makes this one worth seeking out is the ending, which is unlike anything else in the series. The final scene, a game between two other teams, plays with no laugh track and no audience applause at all. The show simply switches the audience off and lets the last image sit in silence. For a series built on a live studio crowd, running a closing scene dry is a deliberate and genuinely strange choice, and it is the only time they did it.

It is also the final appearance of the New Market Mallers, who had been introduced back in season 2, and the last time the show has the Bundy family playing a sport together. Watched now, the episode reads as the show closing a door. Softball had been one of the few things the Bundys did together without it ending in a fight, going back to season 2, and after this it is gone. Al does organise a team again in season 10, but it is NO MA’AM rather than his family, which is a different thing entirely.