Season 8 Episode 13: The Worst Noel

One of the most unusual episodes the series ever made. It is Christmas Eve, it plays out in something close to real time, and it never leaves the Bundy property. There are no guest cast members at all. Two things happen. Outside, Kelly and Bud are attempting to get a jukebox into the house without their parents noticing, a problem of logistics and timing that occupies them for the entire half hour. Inside, Al and Peg are fighting over the remote control, and that argument is the episode. Peg wants to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. Al would rather do almost anything else, and his stated objection to the film is one of the great Al Bundy monologues. So he channel surfs, and the surfing is the episode’s engine: a stream of invented Christmas programming across the entire cable dial, each one more specific than the last, with Al identifying individual reruns from a fraction of a second of footage. Peg’s observation about what else he could be noticing around the house is the best line in the exchange. Marcy and Jefferson come and go through the front door, and each time it opens the sound of the party next door comes in with them. It is one of the series’ best formal experiments and one of its most quoted episodes, largely because the channel surfing sequence works as a time capsule of what was actually on American television in December 1993. It also contains, in Al’s objection to a beloved film, one of the clearest statements of his worldview the show ever wrote.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: December 19, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 13
• Overall episode number: 170
• Written by: Larry Jacobson
• Directed by: Amanda Bearse
• Production note: No guest cast. The episode runs in real time and never leaves the Bundy house and yard.
• Production note: One of the very few times the series breaks the fourth wall. Just before a commercial break Al looks straight into the camera and says that he really hates this commercial.
• Title note: A play on “The First Noel.”

The Channel Surf

The channel surfing sequence is the reason this episode has a reputation. Al moves through the dial too fast for his wife to follow, and when she demands to know what each thing was, he recites them back in order with complete precision, down to which actor was playing Darrin and which Cousteau was presenting the catfish. Peg’s follow-up question about the one thing he consistently fails to see is the punchline, and Al’s answer is four words.

Al’s case against It’s a Wonderful Life is the other standout. He objects to it on the grounds that it depicts a horrible life, offers a theory about why no sequel was made, and gets the film’s authorship wrong in a way that is entirely in character. There was in fact a sequel of sorts, a 1990 television film continuing Clarence’s story, which does nothing to help Al’s argument.

Giving the whole episode to Al and Peg on a couch and the two children in a yard is a real formal experiment for a show in its eighth season, and the restriction is what makes it work. Nobody can escape. The jukebox cannot come in. The television cannot be agreed on. It is Christmas in the Bundy house.

Marcy wears a red Christmas dress in this episode that is near-identical to the one Katey Sagal had worn on the cover of TV Guide the previous December.

Famous Quotes

• Al, on the current programming: “Well I hate Lucy. The real star was Fred. They should’ve killed off Ethel, Lucy and that illegal alien… Made Fred a single man and called it Mertz’s World, but oh well.”
• Peg: “What does Cheers have to do with Christmas?” Al: “What does NBC have to do with television?”
• Al, recapping the dial at speed: “A Bewitched with Dick York, not Dick Sargent, as Darrin; a Gilligan where the gorilla comes to the island; a Full House Christmas special where they get snowed in at the airport; and the mating habits of the Amazonian catfish with Phillipe, not Jacques Cousteau.”
• Peg: “You can see all that, but you can’t see the rim around the toilet?” Al: “I see what I want to see.”
• Al, on the film: “Because it’s a horrible life. You know the reason they never made a sequel? Because when the guy came back he killed himself. And this time he took that angel with him.”

Notes

• “Deck the Halls” is audible from the Darcys’ party every time the Bundy front door opens.
• The Psycho Dad theme turns up for the show’s Christmas special.
• The episode closes on Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song.”
• Al reminds Marcy of his conduct at her previous Christmas party, which involved a large number of cocktail weenies and her boss’s reaction to it.
• A goof: the party music is clearly audible whenever Marcy opens the door, but completely absent in the exterior scenes with Bud and Kelly, who are standing a few feet from the same house.