Season 9 Episode 17: 25 Years and What Do You Get?
February 12, 1995
Al and Peg’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and the episode runs the same play as season 1’s “Sixteen Years and What Do You Get?”: both of them genuinely try to get the other a decent present, and neither manages it. Al has bought Peg a diamond necklace, which he hides in the couch cushions, where Buck finds it while looking for a bone and buries it in the backyard. The rest of the episode is Al, Bud and Kelly excavating the garden. Peg, meanwhile, has been given a day at a spa by Marcy, and spends every dollar Al gave her on treatments with names that are the funniest writing in the episode. By the time both of them get home, each has nothing to give, and the solution they independently arrive at is to pretend they both forgot what day it is. The best scene is not about the gift. It is Al explaining the aging process to his daughter, which he structures as a two-act tragedy: a young man who scored four touchdowns in a single game, and then the arrival of what he calls the Wife Age. Buck’s interjection is the punchline, and Al’s eventual collapse while doing the arithmetic on twenty-five years is one of Ed O’Neill’s better breakdowns.
The gift that never arrives is the structural joke, and Buck is the reason: the necklace Al hid in the couch ends up buried in the back yard, which commits Al, Bud and Kelly to an afternoon of digging. Marcy’s present for Peg is a full day at a spa, which clears the house and lets Al and Jefferson sneak back in, a sequence that gives the series its first look at the side door off the laundry area. The episode runs the same play as season one’s “Sixteen Years and What Do You Get?” and arrives at the same place.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: February 12, 1995
- Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 17
- Overall episode number: 201
- Written by: Donald Beck
- Directed by: Sam W. Orender
- Taped: January 27, 1995
- Production note: Al wears a jacket reading “Farquhar’s Formals,” a nod to Ralph R. Farquhar, a writer and story editor on the series.
- Title note: From the lyric of “Sixteen Tons,” following the same formula as the season 1 episode.
Guest Cast
- Marty Rackham as Dave
- John LeFleur as Sven (credited as John Robert LeFleur)
- David Drummond as Chance
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