Sam W. Orender
Al starts charging Bud rent, which makes Bud a tenant with rights. Bud calls the city, a health inspector declares Al a slumlord and confines him to the basement until he makes repairs. Kelly, meanwhile, has enrolled in an improv class and needs situations to practice.
Bud takes his father’s dating advice to aim low and ends up with Gary, Al’s boss. Al faints. Once he comes round, the family starts working out how to use his son’s new leverage at the shoe store.
Kelly’s coffee commercial loses its male lead, and Jefferson steps in because Marcy has locked him out until he gets a job. The campaign makes him a local sex symbol. Then Al learns the next installment requires his daughter to kiss the neighbor.
Bud cannot study because Ariel keeps turning up, and the family greets their exit with a banner and party horns. Relocating to the library gets him caught, put on probation and threatened with expulsion days before graduation. Marcy is the one who argues his case.
Lucky’s three a.m. habit drives Al to move him outdoors, which means building a doghouse. Marcy calls a building inspector to make sure it is up to code. Kelly, meanwhile, remakes her entire look to keep Carlos, which goes about as well as the carpentry.
Marcy needs one perfect dinner to land a promotion, so she pays Al to leave the neighborhood and hires an actor to play him. The plan survives until her boss hears the real Dodge outside and decides he wants it. Pat Morita guests, and Jefferson does karaoke.
Bud and Kelly find Jefferson in a hospital bed, and the episode flashes back to explain. It starts with NO MA’AM mounting a rescue on the D’Arcys’ anniversary and ends with a misspelled tattoo. Peggy checks in from Paris, still nominally looking for her father.
Griff falls for a phone sex operator called Butter, and Al discovers Butter is Peg’s mother, working from the upstairs phone. Her earnings are paying for the family’s Christmas. Then Griff decides he wants to ask her out.
Bud signs up for a virtual reality study at the university and becomes dependent on it, to the point of boxing up the possessions he no longer needs. Al, meanwhile, has found a light switch that does not seem to do anything, and starts taking the house apart.
It is Al and Peg’s twenty-fifth anniversary and both of them are genuinely trying. Al’s necklace gets buried in the backyard by the dog, and Peg spends all of Al’s money at a spa. They each decide to pretend they forgot the date.