Season 4
Al, Bud and Kelly fly to Las Vegas to retrieve Peg and Marcy, who lost everything at the tables and cannot get home. To raise the fare, Al is entered into a wrestling match against a professional. Peg’s objection is not that he is being beaten, but that the children are watching.
Steve walks out on Marcy to become a park ranger at Yosemite, and sues her for alimony on the way. Peggy’s remedy is to take her to Las Vegas. It is also the first episode where the studio audience applauds the cast walking onto the set.
Al tells the family to start earning their own money, so Kelly takes a job dancing in a music video and Bud appoints himself her agent. Peg’s contribution is to set up a toll booth. This is David Garrison’s final appearance as a regular, and the first of Bud’s many stints managing his sister’s career.
The IRS comes after Al over a return Peg filled in, and he needs five thousand dollars in a hurry. The solution he lands on is selling his wife’s hair. Behind the scenes this was the last episode David Garrison taped as a regular, and the last the show filmed in the 1980s.
A rainstorm gets into the house and Al goes up on the roof to fix it, with the television antenna as his real priority. Katey Sagal has named it her favorite episode of the series, and it was nominated for an Emmy for its editing.
Al has actually saved money for Christmas presents, and a late rush at the shoe store stops him reaching the bank before it closes. The two-parter aired the same night The Simpsons premiered on FOX, and both episodes lean on the same Christmas song.
A guardian angel shows Al what his family’s life would be like if he had never been born, and the answer is that they would all be much better off. Sam Kinison plays the angel — he had been the producers’ first choice to play Al Bundy.
Steve is out of work after the hotline disaster and has been filling his days taking Peg and the kids to the zoo instead of job hunting. Marcy, now demoted to drive-up teller and working fifty hours a week, finds out. The episode is unusual for giving Al and Marcy a genuine scene as friends.
Al has been burying money in a shoe box in the backyard for a new car. Peg found it, dug it up and spent it, so Al goes shopping with nothing and works his way down through progressively worse used cars. He ends his search with the same vehicle he started with, lightly disguised.
Al decides the world needs a shoe advice hotline and asks Steve for fifty thousand dollars to build one. Steve approves the loan to win a sales contest, and the decision ends up costing him his job at the bank and getting Marcy demoted. It is the most expensive thing Al does to the Rhoades in the entire series.
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