Season 10 Episode 2: A Shoe Room with a View

Two storylines run in parallel here, and both are about men trying to get something for nothing. Bud opens the episode freshly unemployed, having been fired from the Department of Vehicle Services for the offense of opening a second window to shorten a long line, and spends the half-hour hunting for work while his mother refuses to look away from the television long enough to hear about it. He eventually lands a gig apprenticing as a chimney sweep, which is less a career move than a punishment the script hands him for ever having had a government job in the first place.

Al’s half of the episode starts with a complaint from Kelly about the bus ride home from her aerobics class and turns into a business proposal. He pitches Gary on filling the empty lot beside the shoe store with an aerobics studio, reasoning that a wall of athletic women on the other side of his workplace is the closest thing to a fringe benefit the job will ever offer him. He then drills peepholes through that wall, and the plan curdles immediately: the clientele the studio actually attracts is nothing like the one he imagined, and Al spends the rest of the half-hour wrestling workout shoes off customers whose feet have, by their own account, expanded during class.

The episode ends with physics settling the argument. The women attempt a group move the show calls the “Dumbo Drop,” the Pointer Sisters play, and the back room of Gary’s Shoes comes down on Al’s head, which is roughly the reward every scheme of his has earned since 1987. It is a tidy, mean, very season-ten piece of construction: Al builds his own trap, installs a window to admire it through, and then stands underneath it.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, September 24, 1995 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 2
• Overall episode 213 of the series
• Taped August 18, 1995; production code 10.02
• Written by Richard Gurman and Stacie Lipp
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title riffs on the 1985 Merchant Ivory film A Room with a View

Guest Cast

• Marco Sanchez as Ramon
• Danica Sheridan as Matilda
• Jennifer Echols as Cynthia
• Sonya Eddy as Arlene
• Jami Music as Rebecca
• Meilani Paul as Melissa
• Marci Brickhouse as Taylor
• Shana Wall as Chantal
• Maureen Costa as Sally

Gary’s Shoes and Accessories for Today’s Woman, Annex

The shoe store had been a punishment posting for nine years at this point, a place where Al stood behind a register and absorbed abuse from customers. This episode briefly entertains the idea that it could be improved, and the improvement is entirely cosmetic: not better pay, not fewer customers, just a better view. That is a sharp read on the character. Al never once tries to leave the job or get promoted within it; his ambitions are confined to making the existing misery slightly more tolerable from where he already stands.

The peephole gag also lets the script put a fine point on the gap between what Al expects of women and what the show is willing to give him. The aerobics studio fills up, which by his own logic should be a victory, and the episode’s joke is that he cannot enjoy a single minute of it. The customers who walk next door into the shoe store afterward become the real punchline, and Danica Sheridan’s Matilda, insisting that all the jumping must have expanded her foot, gets the exchange the episode is remembered for.

Bud’s thread, meanwhile, is one of the series’ better uses of Peggy’s television habit. He comes home needing help and gets a mother who will not look up, cannot be reached by ordinary conversation, and finally responds only when he impersonates a talk-show guest at her. The scene closes the loop on a joke the show had run for a decade: Peggy is not inattentive out of malice, she is simply tuned to a different channel, and Bud’s observation about needing an antenna to get her attention is the tidiest summary of the household’s dynamic anyone offers all season.

Famous Quotes

• Bud: “Girlfriend.” / Peggy: “In the house!” Bud finally breaks through to his mother by snapping his fingers and impersonating a talk-show guest, and her delight evaporates the moment she turns around and sees it is him.
• Peggy: “Shut up, Bud. Oprah is doing a show on mothers who don’t pay attention to their sons.” Getting emotional about the subject while her son stands in front of her waiting for advice.
• Bud: “Well, I can’t expect you to pay any attention to me since I don’t have an antenna coming out of my ass.” After laying out the firing and being met with news about a new frozen dessert.
• Matilda: “I don’t understand it. I was a size six before aerobics class. All that jumping must have expanded my foot.” / Al: “Then I see you must have fallen on your butt a time or two.” Al and Griff struggling to pry a workout shoe off a customer who has just come from next door.

Notes

• The episode confirms Bud has been fired from the Department of Vehicle Services, the job he had held since season nine’s “Driving Mr. Boondy.”
• Al mentions that he and Griff are the only employees at Gary’s Shoes, which is about as close as the series ever comes to an organizational chart.
• Al’s rundown of NO MA’AM membership benefits includes luxury boxes at WrestleMania, use of a classic Dodge when it is running, and a key to the Big ‘Uns reading room when the bowl is unclogged.
• Al also reveals that his own father left him and his mother for a prostitute, one of the show’s rare straight pieces of Bundy backstory.
• Writing visible on the shoe store’s back wall includes “Anderson Tire Service 555-1212” and “Giggly Room x57-4096.”
• “Jump (For My Love)” by the Pointer Sisters scores the “Dumbo Drop” that brings the back room down.
• Goof: when Peggy emerges from the garage with her “Oprah Land” scale model, the open garage door reveals the back of a different set rather than the garage interior.