Season 2
If you want to know what raw, unfiltered energy looks like, look up Sam Kinison. Now imagine that unleashed on the Bundy set. Here’s what happened when a comedy legend played Al’s guardian angel.
Peggy’s relatives arrive — two feuding uncles and three singing aunts, played by the Del Rubio Triplets — while Al tries to watch Hondo. King Kong Bundy plays Uncle Irwin, and the family surname came from him in the first place.
Al wins twelve hundred and fifty dollars at the track and tries to keep it secret. Peggy has already started taking money out of his wallet. Neither of them will confront the other, because that would mean admitting what they are each doing.
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.
Marcy dents Steve’s new Mercedes while he is away, and rather than get angry he announces that the stress has made him impotent — and then commits to it entirely. Marcy spirals. It is also the first episode to show the real Tang bottle.
Kelly is grounded over her grades, and the house is being fumigated, so the whole family decamps to the shoe store. Kelly has a concert to get to. The episode aired the same night Christina Applegate guest-starred on 21 Jump Street.
The series’ Valentine’s Day episode went out live, and viewers phoned in during the broadcast to vote on whether Al should tell Peggy he loves her. Her appeal to the audience covers his socks, his toenail clippings and what is living in his toothbrush.
Marcy tells Al that anything arriving unsolicited in the mail is legally his to keep, and then a credit card turns up addressed to Buck. Everything the family buys on it was borrowed from the homes of the show’s own cast and crew.
A mouse gets into the house, which means confronting Peggy’s childhood fear of mice and watching Al dismantle his own home trying to catch it. The mouse is never in danger. Bud’s goldfish, it later emerges, was not so lucky.
Al and Steve sell Marcy’s twenty-year-old boxed Barbie to fund a baseball card collection, and then have to get it back after the shop is robbed. The search takes them through downtown Chicago — and across the exterior set of another show filming on the same lot.