Season 8 Episode 21: Nooner or Later

April 10, 1994

Published 04/10/94

A radio station is running a contest in which wives call in and get their husbands to do humiliating things on air, and Peg enters. Her targets are modest by the standards of this show: she wants Al to sing a particular power ballad over the phone, she wants him to say aloud the nickname he has for her chest, and she wants him to come home from work in the middle of the day. He declines all three, repeatedly, at increasing volume, and the reason the episode works is what is happening behind him while he does it. Al is at the shoe store with a temporary assistant named Dexter, and over the course of Peg’s phone calls Dexter is first injured by a customer, then collapses, then becomes the subject of a full resuscitation attempt by two paramedics, complete with chest compressions and a defibrillator, all of it visible in frame while Al holds the receiver and argues with his wife about the nickname. The cutting between the two is the whole joke and it is relentless. Meanwhile Bud and Kelly are queuing for concert tickets, and the episode is a steady procession of strangers identifying each sibling’s particular weakness and using it to move them further back in the line. It is one of the most purely well-constructed episodes of the eighth season, and the shoe store sequence is a masterclass in letting a background emergency do all the work while the foreground argues about nothing. Bud and Kelly’s queue, meanwhile, is a short catalogue of every weakness the two characters have.

Episode Facts

Original air date: April 10, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 21
Overall episode number: 178
Written by: Nancy Neufeld Callaway
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Production note: The first episode in which Katey Sagal’s second pregnancy is deliberately hidden behind props, including a bag of chips, a cereal box and a telephone. After the season 6 miscarriage the show had chosen not to write a pregnancy in again.
Production note: The only appearance of Dexter, Al’s temporary assistant. No explanation is given for Aaron Mitchell’s absence.
Title note: A play on “sooner or later,” with the other term defined in the episode.