Season 11 Episode 23: How to Marry a Moron (2)

Lonnie gets out of prison and keeps his promise, returning to propose to Kelly properly. Al objects on the reasonable grounds that the man is a convicted criminal, and withdraws the objection the moment he learns Lonnie is heir to the Tot family fortune, Earl and Pearl Tot, of Weenie Tots, played by Gordon Jump and Edie McClurg. A wedding is arranged in the back yard. Then Al sees Lonnie at the Jiggly Room and has to decide whether to tell his daughter, a dilemma Bud attempts to resolve by bribing him with a John Wayne picture on a ten-foot projector.

The wedding collapses when the Tots’ domestic arrangements come out: Lonnie has several wives, Pearl keeps a boyfriend, and Earl is on his fifth marriage. Al’s response is a speech defending what he calls the torturous sanctity of marriage, which the assembled guests endorse loudly, and which amounts to the series’ only sincere statement of principle, that a Bundy marriage lasts forever no matter how pitiful or disgusting it is to wake up to the same person. The wedding is cancelled. Kelly keeps the ring, Al keeps the ten-thousand-dollar debt, and her offer of consolation goes to a row of former boyfriends rather than her brother.

The ending plays like a finale, and it very nearly was, but it was not meant to be. FOX cancelled the series while the cast were on break, citing production costs and falling ratings, and the news reached them from outside: Ed O’Neill heard it from a newlywed couple who offered condolences while he was home in Youngstown, Christina Applegate heard from someone who had caught it on a Los Angeles radio show, and Katey Sagal learned of it at the gym. The studio had not called any of them. Another season with a proper send-off had been expected.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Monday, May 5, 1997 on FOX
• Season 11, Episode 23, part two of two
• Overall episode 261 of the series
• Taped March 28, 1997; production code 11.24
• Story by Vince Cheung and Ben Montanio; teleplay by Pamela Eells and Russell Marcus
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title plays on the 1953 comedy How to Marry a Millionaire
• Aired exactly one month after the tenth anniversary of the pilot; it was the second-to-last episode broadcast, with one more airing out of order weeks later

Guest Cast

• Gordon Jump as Earl Tot
• Edie McClurg as Pearl Tot
• Rance Howard as the Reverend

The Ending Nobody Planned

This episode closes the series by accident. It was produced in the expectation of a twelfth season and a proper farewell, and FOX cancelled the show over the summer break, citing high production costs against a declining audience. The cast found out the way the public did. Ed O’Neill was home in Youngstown, Ohio, when a newlywed couple delighted to meet Al Bundy offered him their condolences about the cancellation they had heard on the radio, which was the first he knew of it. Christina Applegate learned from an acquaintance who had heard it on a Los Angeles morning show, and has said that nobody from the studio contacted her or the rest of the cast. Katey Sagal was on an exercise bike at her gym; FOX’s then-president Peter Roth took her to lunch later that summer to apologise.

Taken on its own terms it is a decent last outing, and Al’s speech is an unexpectedly fitting closing statement. Confronted with a family that treats marriage as an arrangement of convenience, he defends permanence, not happiness, not affection, just permanence, no matter how disgusting the person next to you is. Eleven years of material about a man who hated his life resolve into an insistence that he would not leave it.

The episode is also dense with the kind of continuity the series rarely bothered to flag. Peggy flips the switch under the kitchen counter to examine the diamond, the same mystery switch Al and Jefferson tore the house apart over in season nine’s “User Friendly,” which turned out to control Buck’s doghouse light. Peggy mentions morning sickness on her wedding day, which confirms the shotgun wedding the show had implied for a decade. And Gordon Jump and Edie McClurg had played opposite each other two decades earlier on WKRP in Cincinnati.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “So that’s the kind of lowlife scum you people are. No respect for the torturous sanctity of marriage. Now let me tell you something: We Bundys may have our faults, but we believe that marriage should be forever, no matter how pitiful or disgusting it may be to wake up to the same person.”
• Peggy: “Are you okay?” / Kelly: “I think so. I mean, I’m gonna miss Lonnie, but at least I have something that will always remind me of him.” / Al: “A $10,000 wedding debt?” / Kelly: “No, Daddy, that’s yours. I’ve got this.”
• Bud: “We’re here for you, Kel.” / Kelly: “Not you!” The consolation duties going instead to a line of former boyfriends.
• Bud on Kelly’s history, which Al for once does not dispute: she has not been a virgin since 1979.

Notes

• Peggy examines the engagement ring under the switch beneath the kitchen counter, the same one Al and Jefferson destroyed the house looking for in season nine’s “User Friendly,” which controlled Buck’s doghouse light.
• Peggy’s mention of morning sickness on her wedding day confirms the shotgun wedding the series had implied repeatedly, including in “The Joke’s on Al.”
• Gordon Jump and Edie McClurg had appeared together on WKRP in Cincinnati in the 1970s.
• Rance Howard, who plays the reverend, had appeared in season ten’s “Enemies” alongside his wife Jean Speegle Howard; their son Clint Howard appeared in season nine’s “And Bingo Was Her Game-O.”
• Jennifer Diane Hanson, the dancer behind Lonnie at the Jiggly Room, had appeared in season three’s “Requiem for a Dead Barber” as the salon receptionist.
• Starla is mentioned by name but does not appear; Bud writes to her at the top of the episode.
• Peggy implies that the happiest day of her life involved the entire Polk High Panthers squad, consistent with claims Al had made since season four.