Season 8 Episode 8: Scared Single
November 7, 1993
Al hires a summer assistant at the shoe store, a Polk High graduate named Aaron Mitchell, and discovers something he has never encountered before: a young man who regards Al Bundy as a hero. Aaron knows about the four touchdowns. He also knows about the four holes Al drilled into the wall of the girls’ locker room, and holds both achievements in roughly equal esteem. For a few scenes Al gets to be revered, and it is genuinely touching in the way only this show could make it. Then Aaron announces that he is getting married, and Al’s entire demeanour changes, because he now has a mission. He takes the boy to the mall lounge, the bench area where husbands sit while their wives shop, and conducts a tour. The lost souls, the meek, the miserable, the married, and then the lowest tier of all, the men relegated to holding their wives’ handbags. Al narrates each case history. He leads the assembled men in a song. The whole sequence is the fullest expression of the show’s central joke that the series ever staged, and it is played dead straight. Running alongside it, Kelly has taken a faceful of pesticide while filming a Verminator commercial and spends the episode in a chemical fog, unresponsive on the couch. It is one of the strongest episodes of the season and one of the few that gives Al an audience who takes him seriously, which is also what makes the ending land: he spends the whole episode trying to save a young man from the life he has, and the reason he bothers is that Aaron is the first person in years to look at him and see something worth being.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: November 7, 1993
- Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 8
- Overall episode number: 165
- Written by: Katherine Green
- Directed by: Sam W. Orender
- Taped: October 15, 1993
- Production note: The first appearance of Aaron Mitchell, who recurs through season 8.
- Title note: Al had wished for a “Scared Single” programme back in season 6’s “Rites of Passage.” The show remembered and built an episode on it.
Guest Cast
- Hill Harper as Aaron Mitchell
- Rose Jackson as Angie
- Tami Roman as Meg (credited as Tami Akbar)
- Joe Bob Briggs as Billy Ray Wetnap (credited as John Bloom)
- Mary-Pat Green as Marge
- Melissa Behr as Heidi
- Tara Karsian as the woman at the store
- Joe Ochman as the guy
- Jeff Heston as the emaciated man
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