Season 2 Episode 20: Just Married… with Children

Al and Peggy want onto a game show called How Do I Love Thee?, which tests how well couples know each other and humiliates them for it, and the only way in is to apply as Steve and Marcy Rhoades. They do. What they do not know is that Steve and Marcy have had the same idea in reverse and applied as Al and Peg Bundy, which means both couples arrive at the studio under each other’s names and have to compete anyway.

It is the best-constructed episode of the second season and one of the most purely farcical the series ever made. The premise commits both couples to maintaining a lie in front of a studio audience and a host who has no interest in helping, and the questions are designed to expose exactly the things each pair is pretending about. Geoff Pierson plays the host, Roland Squab, with precisely the right note of sadism; he went on to lead Unhappily Ever After, the sitcom created by this show’s own Ron Leavitt, playing a character built along much the same lines as Al Bundy.

The episode also establishes the two marriages’ relative ages on the record: Steve and Marcy at thirteen months, Al and Peggy at sixteen years. Both figures line up with what the series had already shown, the Bundys’ sixteenth anniversary in season one, the Rhoades’ first a few episodes earlier in “Peggy Loves Al, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.”

The series returned to this format once more, nine years later, in season eleven’s “Breaking Up Is Easy to Do,” where a board game asks the same kind of questions and Al fails them badly. He performs considerably better here. Catherine Rusoff, who plays Mona Squab, is Ed O’Neill’s wife.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: March 6, 1988
• Season 2, Episode 20, and the 33rd episode of the series
• Written by Ellen L. Fogle
• Directed by Linda Day

Guest Cast

• David Leisure as Bink Winkleman
• Geoff Pierson as Roland Squab
• Catherine Rusoff as Mona Squab
• Jessie Scott as the Lovely Zelda

Electric Chairs on a Game Show

An invitation to a newlywed game show called How Do I Love Thee? gets delivered to the Bundys by mistake. The show only takes couples married two years or less, so Al and Peg go on as Steve and Marcy Rhoades. Then the grand finale pits them against another couple, and the other couple is Steve and Marcy, competing as Al and Peg Bundy.

What makes the episode work is that How Do I Love Thee? is not a quiz. It is a series of stunts performed on your spouse: spinning them on a wheel, pinning them under a mattress, and finally wiring them into an electric chair while the other one decides how much voltage a car is worth. Peg goes to 110. Marcy, who swore she could not do it, goes to 80 the second Steve says a woman’s place is in the home.

Famous Quotes

• Bink: “Alright, now that you’ve wished each other good luck, gentlemen, to your electric chairs!” The cheeriest sentence in the series.
• Al: “I welcome death!” Al, taking his seat.
• Steve: “Juice me till I’m ash, they’re not getting that car.” Steve, who has never wanted anything this badly.
• Peggy: “Aw, come on honey! It’s for a car!” Peg, at the dial.

Notes

• Bink Winkleman is a parody of game show host Wink Martindale, and How Do I Love Thee? is a parody of The Newlywed Game, including its rule limiting contestants to couples married two years or less. That rule is the entire plot engine.
• Geoff Pierson, who plays Roland Squab, later starred as Jack Malloy, a character cut from much the same cloth as Al, in Unhappily Ever After, created by Married… with Children co-creator Ron Leavitt.
• Catherine Rusoff, who plays Mona Squab, is Ed O’Neill’s wife.
• Steve and Marcy are established as married thirteen months here, Al and Peg as sixteen years.
• Peggy calls Al “Machiavelli” when he suggests throwing the invitation away instead of impersonating the neighbors.
• Goof: in the long shots of Peg on the spinning wheel, a dummy is clearly standing in for her.