Season 7 Episode 14: It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This

January 24, 1993

Published 01/24/93

Al has arranged one week alone at a mountain cabin belonging to his boss, and the only thing he wants from the trip is silence. Peg decides to come. Marcy, having had another argument with Jefferson about his spending, decides to come as well. So Al spends his vacation carrying two women’s luggage into a cabin and then listening to them fight with each other continuously for several days, a sequence the show eventually gives up on scoring seriously and sets to “Yakety Sax.” By day three the arguing has followed him into the bedroom and then into the bathroom. When he finally secures a room with a door that closes, his reaction is to stand in it and weep with gratitude, and the speech he gives about every television father he grew up watching having had a bed of his own is the most sincere thing in the episode. Back in Chicago, Bud, Kelly and Seven have been left behind without warning. Bud’s parting curse, yelled at an empty street, is one of the best things David Faustino ever got to deliver. The three of them then discover Marcy’s credit card, and Jefferson joins in, and by the time Marcy gets home there is a massage therapist and a lingerie model in the Bundy living room and a great deal of food. The episode is Michael G. Moye’s only solo writing credit of the season, and it is structured as two completely separate farces that never touch, which is the right call: neither group has any idea what the other is doing, and neither would care.

Episode Facts

Original air date: January 24, 1993
Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 14
Overall episode number: 145
Written by: Michael G. Moye
Directed by: Sam W. Orender
Taped: January 15, 1993
Production note: The cabin exterior in the closing snow scene is a reused set from the ABC sitcom Free Spirit, where it served as the back of the Harper house. That show shared production companies with this one, and MWC writer-producer Richard Gurman was its executive producer.
Production note: From this episode the closing credits switch to a larger type treatment, a style that spread to the opening producer credits a few weeks later and reverted in season 11.
Title note: From the idiom, with a probable nod to the Old Milwaukee beer campaign that used the same line.