Season 8 Episode 22: Ride Scare

April 24, 1994

Published 04/24/94

The New Market Mall has signed up to an environmental initiative sponsored by Marcy’s bank, and the practical consequence is that mall employees must now carpool. Al’s assigned group is three professional models, and the scene in which he reads their names off the sheet, repeats them with rising delight and runs for the stairs is one of the better bits of Ed O’Neill physical comedy in the season, because the show then cuts straight to him wedged in the back of the vehicle discovering what kind of models they are. The carpool is then selected to front the city’s clean-up campaign, which puts Al in a commercial. Meanwhile Bud comes home with straight As and a place on the Dean’s List, and gets nothing: Al responds with a nostalgic monologue about cars that has no connection to what his son said, Peg asks whether the Dean is a nice boy, and the moment Kelly arrives to announce a raise and an employee-of-the-month award, the room turns to her. The series had run the same joke in season 5, when Bud’s invitation to meet the President was flattened by Kelly becoming Miss Weenie Tot. This is also the episode with the Seven gag, which has outlived everything else in it. It is a decent enough episode on its own terms and an immortal one for twenty seconds of it, because the milk carton is the single funniest acknowledgement any sitcom has ever made of quietly deleting a character. The Dean’s List material, meanwhile, is one of the clearest statements the show ever made about what it costs to be the only competent person in that house.

Episode Facts

Original air date: April 24, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 22
Overall episode number: 179
Written by: Nancy Neufeld Callaway
Directed by: Sam W. Orender
Production note: This episode contains the milk carton gag, in which Seven appears under a Missing headline. It was ranked number 73 on TV Guide and TV Land’s 2005 list of the 100 Most Unexpected Moments in TV History.
Production note: Marcy’s speech about people riding the bus in her America was lifted for Amanda Bearse’s clip in the season 9 opening credits.
Title note: A play on “ride share.”