Al Bundy
Steve Rhoades returns to reclaim Marcy and finds she has remarried, which puts both her husbands in the same room. He is also on the run from the police, so the Bundys have to decide whether friendship beats the reward money.
Bud rents his father out to the neighborhood as a professional woodsman to raise concert money, and sends him into the woods with a party of local children. Al knows nothing about camping. Back home, Peggy hosts the women’s answer to season one’s poker game.
A Labor Day barbecue, and the premiere inverts the marriage entirely: Peggy does housework, Al finds it arousing, and she spends the episode trying to decline. It is also the first time “Bad to the Bone” is used as Al’s anthem.
Peggy makes an obscene gesture at another driver while riding with Steve, and the driver gets a good look at Steve. He invites the Bundys to stay for protection. They move in, and the episode becomes an inventory of what they take.
Peggy’s favorite bra is discontinued on her birthday, so Al and Steve set out across Wisconsin to find one. This is the episode that triggered the Terry Rakolta advertiser boycott, which ended up handing the show the biggest audience it had ever had.
Al and Peggy apply to a sadistic game show as Steve and Marcy, only to find that Steve and Marcy have applied as Al and Peg. Both couples have to compete under each other’s names. It is the second season’s best-built farce.
Steve returns from a rafting trip with a beard and refuses to shave it, which ends with him moving in next door. Al is delighted to have a houseguest who cooks. It is also the first episode directed by Gerry Cohen, who went on to direct more of the series than anyone.
Al invites Steve to poker and Steve loses his whole paycheck to him, which Marcy wants back. It is the only episode of the series without Bud, and the first without Kelly. It also introduces Al’s friends, one of whom lasts long enough to become a NO MA’AM member.
Al and Steve buy a 1965 Mustang to restore, and the project consumes both of them entirely. Peggy and Marcy find their own common ground in hating it. Al’s dream sequence about escaping in the car gets undercut a week later, when the license plate turns out to be Peggy’s.
A robber is working the neighborhood, so the Rhoades get a guard dog and Al buys a gun. Both defenses are tested on the same night and the dog comes off worst. It aired the same night The Simpsons first appeared on television, as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show.
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