Season 6 Episode 7: If I Could See Me Now

Al Bundy’s eyesight has been quietly failing for some time, and this episode is about the lengths he will go to in order not to admit it. The warning signs are everywhere. He watches television through binoculars. He cannot read a phone number off the screen fast enough to win a hundred dollar sports trivia prize, which Jefferson takes instead by simply getting to the phone first, a humiliation Al settles by putting his neighbor through the front door. He misidentifies the person on the cover of the TV Guide, and when corrected, argues that there is no meaningful difference between the two names. Bud and Kelly campaign for him to get glasses and Al resists on the grounds that his vision is perfect and also that people will call him Magoo. He eventually relents, and the trip to an optician called Optique gives the episode its set piece: a trying-on montage scored to ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man,” with Al and both kids performing the dance moves from the video. Then the glasses go on for real and the episode delivers its actual joke, which is that Al Bundy’s life is considerably easier to tolerate out of focus. He can now see his car. He can see what he has been putting shoes on all day. He can see his paycheck. He sends it back on the grounds that it cannot possibly be correct. It is a tidy twenty-two minutes of television and it is also a small landmark for the series, because it is the first episode Amanda Bearse directed, and she would go on to direct more of this show than anyone else.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: October 27, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 7
• Overall episode number: 112
• Written by: Gabrielle Topping
• Directed by: Amanda Bearse
• Taped: October 11, 1991
• Production note: Amanda Bearse’s directorial debut. She does not appear on camera in the episode, though Marcy is mentioned by name.
• Production note: Peggy does not appear on camera either. Katey Sagal was taking time off, and her absence over the following episodes was explained in-story as trips to Mardi Gras and shopping.
• Title note: A play on “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity, a musical Christina Applegate would star in on Broadway in 2005.

Guest Cast

• Robert Fieldsteel as Wally
• Gene “Bean” Baxter as the TV announcer (voice, credited as Gene Baxter)

20/20 Vision

This is the episode where Amanda Bearse moved behind the camera for the first time. She went on to direct dozens of episodes of this series and a long list of other sitcoms afterward, and starting with a Peggy-free, Marcy-free bottle episode about Al and the kids was a sensible way to begin. The voice heard briefly from upstairs as Peggy is not Katey Sagal, and it is noticeably not quite right.

The “Sharp Dressed Man” montage is the bit people remember, partly because the whole family commits to the ZZ Top video choreography. Earlier promos for the episode used “Born to Be Wild” over the same footage, and also featured a take where Al jumps on the discarded glasses with both feet rather than the single stomp and kick that made the final cut.

The payoff is better written than the premise deserves. Once Al can see, he catalogues what he has gained: a clear view of his own rusting car, a clear view of the legs he spends his days fitting shoes onto, and a clear view of his wages. Kelly’s description of the car, built entirely around the sun glinting off the rust and the rag serving as a gas cap, is one of her sharpest lines of the season.

Gene “Bean” Baxter voices the TV announcer running the trivia contest, his second appearance on the show after playing DJ Rick Cool in season 5’s “Oldies But Young ‘Uns.”

Famous Quotes

• Jefferson, having beaten Al to the phone for the hundred dollar prize: “I’m sorry, Al. You gotta be quicker! It’s a young man’s world!”
• Al, when Kelly asks what happened to the front door: “Oh, a young man went through it!”
• Al, demonstrating his new glasses on the TV Guide cover, corrected by Kelly: “Delta Burke, Raymond Burr, City of Seattle. What’s the difference?”
• Al, on the drawbacks of sight: “People who work putting shoes on fat women who wear dresses should not have 20/20 vision. I saw things on human legs today that would’ve put a white flag in Schwarzkopf’s hand.”
• Bud: “You actually saw your pay check?” Al: “Yeah! But I sent that back. It just can’t be right.”

Notes

• The optician is called Optique.
• Kelly establishes that Al is over forty. Working from his stated birth year of 1948, he would be forty-two or forty-three here.
• Al sings along happily to the Facts of Life theme in this episode, which flatly contradicts “Kelly Does Hollywood” three episodes later, where he wishes death on the people who wrote it.
• Robert Fieldsteel, who plays Wally, had guest starred on Designing Women, the show Al is effectively referencing when he mixes up Delta Burke and Raymond Burr.
• Bud compares himself and Al to the Redenbachers, a reference the show had already made in “And Baby Makes Money.”
• A goof: the large hole Jefferson left in the front door is still there when the family leaves for the optician and mysteriously repaired by the time they get back. A bowl of fruit on the coffee table also vanishes, leaving one banana that moves between shots.