Season 1
Steve is away, and Marcy begins dreaming nightly about a romantic, attentive version of Al. She is appalled. The episode gives Marcy an interior life nobody around her can take seriously, and logs the first mentions of the Bundy house number and Lake Chicamocomico.
Al leaves home after a fight and stays with his colleague Luke Ventura. Two sisters arrive, Luke takes one to bed, and the other spends the episode working on Al. He turns her down, which is the episode’s actual point and the reason the character stayed likeable.
Al refuses to buy Peggy a VCR, so she takes a job selling clocks and earns the money herself. Al discovers that her absence leaves nothing between him and the children. Then both of them decide they want her home, and neither will admit it first.
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.
Steve and Marcy take Bud and Kelly for a weekend expecting to be a good influence, and the house does not survive it. Al and Peggy, meanwhile, have the best weekend of their marriage in a cheap motel. It is also the first time the series shows Peggy cleaning anything.
Al and Peggy agree to skip anniversary gifts and neither can stick to it. Peggy buys one anyway. Al’s credit card is declined at the jeweler’s, so he comes home with nothing. The series ran the same story again nine years later for their twenty-fifth.
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.
Steve and Marcy have a tax refund and want to add a room, so Al lobbies for a pool room while Peggy and Marcy want an exercise room. Four people spend the episode negotiating over a room no Bundy will pay for. It is one of the series’ two bottle episodes.
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.
Marcy gives Peggy a diet book meant to improve her love life, and Peggy puts the whole family on it. The episode is really about withholding, the weapon both Bundys would use on each other for eleven seasons. It is also the first time the show goes upstairs.
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