Season 7 Episode 26: The Proposition

The season 7 finale, and the last episode co-creator Ron Leavitt worked on. A cosmetics magnate called Coco appears on television and identifies herself as Polk High’s most famous graduate, a claim Al rejects on the spot and on the record. She is also, it emerges, an old girlfriend of his, and she has not stopped thinking about him. She turns up in Chicago, finds him at the shoe store, and makes an offer: five hundred thousand dollars, paid to Peg, in exchange for Al. The family convenes to discuss it. Peg’s position is that they cannot sell Daddy, though she arrives there only after physically examining him and failing to understand the valuation. Kelly’s contribution is a sustained argument in favour of the sale, conducted almost entirely through French phrases she does not understand, and finished with a cheerleading routine. Bud makes his own case. Marcy, who has come over on the pretext of Jefferson needing product advice, uses the opportunity to question whether anyone could want Al for sex at all, and Al’s reply about her figure and Coco’s vanishing cream is the last great Al-to-Marcy insult of the season. Vanna White plays Coco, which the series had been setting up without knowing it since season 2, when Al and his friends listed her among the components of an ideal woman. As a season closer it is an odd choice, since it resolves nothing and changes nothing, but as the last thing one of the show’s two creators put his hands on, it is a fitting enough exit: Al is offered a way out, and the way out is somebody else buying him.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: May 16, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 26
• Overall episode number: 157
• Written by: Arthur Silver
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: April 30, 1993
• Production note: The season 7 finale. After this episode co-creator Ron Leavitt and writer-producer Arthur Silver left the series, going on to create Unhappily Ever After for the WB.
• Production note: Katey Sagal, Amanda Bearse and Ted McGinley all singled out working with Vanna White on this episode in the 1995 retrospective My Favorite Married.
• Title note: Named for Coco’s offer, and modelled on Indecent Proposal, which had come out that spring.

Guest Cast

• Vanna White as Coco, formerly Helen Granowinner
• Kevin Schon as Phil
• Jane Childerhose as the customer in the store