Season 5 Episode 5: The Dance Show

October 21, 1990

Published 10/21/90

Peg has been going out dancing, which is how she meets Andy, who is handsome, attentive and entirely uninterested in her for reasons she never once considers. Al meets Andy’s husband Pete, who turns out to cook, and the single most dangerous thing anyone can do to Al Bundy is feed him properly.

The episode works because both Bundys are getting something they want and neither can admit what it is. Peg wants to be looked at. Al wants dinner. The show had already run a version of this in season 2, when Steve moved in and started cooking, and Al reacted the same way then: instant, uncomplicated loyalty to whoever is operating the stove.

The cold open is the strongest run of material. Al announces he wants to do what the newlyweds down the street were doing, having watched them through their window, and Peg is enthusiastically on board until he reveals what he actually saw. He had been at that window long enough, he says, that the neighbourhood children mistook him for a jack-o-lantern.

Peg also tells Andy, apparently sincerely, that it has been two years since she had sex with Al and twelve since she danced with anyone. Both figures contradict episodes the show had already aired, which is normal for this series: the numbers exist to serve whichever scene needs them. The episode is also a decent snapshot of where the show sat in 1990. The gay couple are written as the only functional, mutually happy marriage anyone in the neighborhood has met, which is doing something, even if the Bundys never quite notice. Al’s objection to Andy is never about who he is married to, it is that Peg went out and he did not get fed.