Season 8 Episode 19: Field of Screams

February 27, 1994

Published 02/27/94

The city is going to pave over the Polk High football field to make room for a Trans-Mexican auto plant, and Al Bundy is not going to allow it. The field is where he scored four touchdowns in a single game, which makes it the only piece of ground on earth that means anything to him, and his campaign escalates from a city council meeting to handcuffing himself to a goal post and refusing to leave. The local news covers it, which is how the rest of the family finds out, and the reporter’s framing of the story as the lighter and more pitiful side of the news is about right. Al’s stated condition for leaving is that the project move or that Marcy grow lips. Running against him is the fact that the Darcys stand to make a great deal of money from the deal and are already planning to move out of the neighbourhood, which gives the episode a genuine conflict rather than just a protest. The other half belongs to Bud and Buck, who have been cast in a Verminator commercial for Kelly’s employer and get hit with an experimental compound, with results that affect Bud’s chest and cause Buck to keep changing species. It is one of the more interesting late-period Al episodes, because the thing he is defending is not a grievance or a scheme but a genuine piece of his own history, and the show lets him lose it. The Darcys standing to profit from the same deal gives the conflict some real teeth, and Marcy gets the best line of the episode out of it.

Episode Facts

Original air date: February 27, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 19
Overall episode number: 176
Written by: Al Aidekman
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Production note: Al reveals here that he never played after halftime, because Polk High was always too far ahead.
Title note: A play on Field of Dreams, which the series had already parodied earlier in the same season in “Proud to Be Your Bud.”