Stacie Lipp
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.
A deliveryman asks Kelly out to spite his girlfriend, she retaliates with a millionaire, and all four spend the evening at a diner trying to out-jealous each other. Marcy and Jefferson turn up determined to have an authentic neighborhood experience. A spin-off pilot that never sold.
Kelly’s five-year high school reunion brings back Eric Waters, the taped-glasses nerd she once sent to the top of the Hancock tower stripped to the buff. He has done well for himself and he remembers. At home, Marcy’s toys-for-guns drive arms Al and Peggy.
Bud is fired from the Department of Vehicle Services and ends up apprenticing as a chimney sweep. Al, meanwhile, talks Gary into opening an aerobics studio next door and drills peepholes through the shoe store wall. The clientele is not what he had in mind.
A backdoor pilot set at Trumaine’s campus radio station, where two student DJs interview the new dean of students, Steve Rhoades, and are expelled for it. Bud is in the next studio competing for a girl with a live microphone open.
Al loses the breastfeeding fight on the law, so he converts Gary’s into a men’s shoe store. Then Gary announces an inspection, and Al paints the men’s stock to pass it off as women’s. Gary turns out to be a woman. Conclusion of two.
Marcy overcomes her fear of public speaking by imagining herself having sex instead, and the resulting performance at the bank launches a new career. Al is in the audience, which leaves him temporarily impotent.
Bud’s country and western makeover fails badly enough that he retires from dating entirely and moves into the basement. Then he starts building a portal, and something comes through it. Al, meanwhile, is fighting an automated phone system over a car part. The clip reel of Bud’s past failures is the highlight.
Al’s bedroom reputation has become public knowledge and a neighborhood joke, so he sets out to get back in shape. The training goes badly enough that the Darcys have to carry him home unconscious. Peg spends the episode protecting his confidence. The scene everyone remembers involves a flattened squirrel named Zippy.
A theater cashier mistakes Al for a senior citizen, and Al decides the discount is worth keeping. He gets a card, abuses it thoroughly, and then enters a senior athletic championship, where for once he is competing against people he can actually beat. Peg’s account of his actual athletic career is the highlight.