Season 9 Episode 8: Sleepless in Chicago

Al and Jefferson go to an auction, where Al wins the first ever issue of Big ‘Uns and Jefferson picks up a nurse Barbie for Marcy. Jefferson then learns that the doll is worth fifty thousand dollars to a collector who was at the same auction, and the problem is that Marcy has not put it down since he handed it to her. She sleeps holding it. So Jefferson comes to Al with a request, which he phrases badly and then has to clarify: he needs Al to lie down next to Marcy in the dark long enough for Jefferson to swap the valuable doll for an ordinary one. Al agrees, which puts him in the Darcys’ bed in his pyjamas, and the episode plays the whole sequence as a heist. Peg, meanwhile, notices her husband is missing and becomes genuinely worried. The other half belongs to Kelly, who has been chosen to record a public service announcement and has decided to do it as a brunette, on the theory that blondes are not taken seriously. Her explanation of the stereotype she is trying to escape contains the single best malapropism of the ninth season. The series had done a Barbie retrieval plot before, in season 2’s “Guys and Dolls.”

The favour Jefferson needs is the engine, and the show lets him take an unreasonably long time to say it out loud. Al’s willingness to consider it is entirely contingent on the magazine he has just won and has not yet paid for, which gives Jefferson the only leverage anyone in this arrangement has ever had over him. Kelly’s parallel story, going brunette to be taken seriously for a public service announcement, gets the episode’s opening scene and one of the better extended bits of Al refusing to notice his own daughter.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: October 23, 1994
• Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 8
• Overall episode number: 191
• Written and directed by: Katherine Green
• Production note: Jefferson’s middle name is given here as Milhous.
• Production note: The shot of Jefferson shutting the Bundy front door on Marcy was used for Ted McGinley’s clip in the season 10 opening credits.
• Title note: A play on Sleepless in Seattle.

Guest Cast

• Juliet Tablak as Amber
• Allan Trautman as the Barbiephile
• Kenneth Danziger as the auctioneer

The Barbie Heist

Katherine Green wrote and directed this one, which is unusual for the series and shows in how cleanly the two plots are kept apart. The Barbie material is structured as a caper with a single point of failure, and the point of failure is Al Bundy in a bed he does not want to be in.

Jefferson’s initial phrasing of the request, and Al’s immediate physical response to it, is the best beat in the episode. The clarification that follows does not improve things much, and the negotiation over the magazine Al has not yet paid for runs underneath the whole conversation.

Kelly’s opening scene with her father is a small masterpiece of two people having different conversations. Al is analysing the logic of criminals throwing their guns at Superman. Kelly is waiting to be asked about her hair. Al’s failure to recognize his own daughter in a wig, and his instruction to tell her to come in, is the kind of joke the show could land because Ed O’Neill never once played it as deliberate.

Al’s reading of what the S on the chest stands for, and his interest in kryptonite as a potential household product, are the two best lines he gets.

Allan Trautman, the collector here, later worked on Unhappily Ever After, the Ron Leavitt series that followed this one, where he puppeteered Mr. Floppy.

Famous Quotes

• Kelly: “Daddy, do you notice anything different about me?” Al: “No, son.” Kelly: “Daddy, it’s Kelly.” Al: “Well, tell her to come in!”
• Kelly, explaining the wig: “Blondes have a reputation for being dumb. Which we all know is just a stereo system.”
• Kelly: “What’s the big ‘S’ stand for?” Al: “‘Straight’. Can’t be too careful when you take your pants off in a phone booth.”
• Al, on the episode he is watching: “I’m studying this kryptonite thing. If it’ll stop Superman, it might just work on your mother.”
• Jefferson, making his request: “I need you to sleep with Marcy.” Then, after Al hits him with a magazine: “I don’t mean ‘sleep’ with her. Just lie next to her so I can have enough time to switch that Barbie.”

Notes

• Peg plays “Blow the Man Down” and “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” on her concertina.
• A continuity problem: Marcy says here that her parents never allowed her a Barbie and gave her a Chinese back scratcher to dress instead, but in season 2’s “Guys and Dolls” she had one and had kept it boxed for twenty years.
• Al gets excited when Dragnet appears on screen. Ed O’Neill would star in the 2003 film version nine years later.
• A goof: Jefferson tells Al his pyjama top is soaked while escorting him to the window ladder, and it is visibly dry.