Season 8 Episode 12: A Little Off the Top

December 12, 1993

Published 12/12/93

Al hurts his back playing football with Aaron Mitchell and his friends, and the doctor’s recommendation is a minor procedure: a small circular incision in the lower back to take the pressure off his spine. Peg’s reaction to the news is one of her better extended demolitions, taking in a proposed career for him in the circus and a bell tower before she concedes that both would pay better than selling shoes. Al goes in. The surgical team misreads the instruction. Instead of a circular incision, Al receives a circumcision, and the scene in which Peg learns this, mid-phone-call to Marcy from a hospital payphone, is the best-constructed sequence in the episode. She is in the middle of telling Marcy that the odds of anything going wrong are negligible when the doctor arrives to tell her something has gone wrong, and she keeps Marcy on the line throughout. The doctor’s reassurance about Al’s ability to return to work is brutal even by this show’s standards. Where they have put him afterwards is the punchline. The rest of the episode is the family attempting to keep a recovering Al calm and unexcited, which involves Bud hiding the magazines in the basement, and it ends with one of the very few occasions in eleven seasons on which Al Bundy actively wants to go to bed with his wife. It is one of the most notorious episodes of the run and one of the very few where the show’s willingness to go somewhere no other network sitcom would is the entire point of the exercise rather than a garnish on it.

Episode Facts

Original air date: December 12, 1993
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 12
Overall episode number: 169
Written by: Michael G. Moye
Directed by: Sam W. Orender
Production note: The premise is thought to have come from a rough draft written back in season 4 that FOX rejected during the fallout from the Terry Rakolta boycott.
Title note: A haircut phrase doing double duty as a description of the plot.