Season 7 Episode 26: The Proposition

The season 7 finale, and the last episode co-creator Ron Leavitt worked on. A cosmetics magnate called Coco appears on television and identifies herself as Polk High’s most famous graduate, a claim Al rejects on the spot and on the record. She is also, it emerges, an old girlfriend of his, and she has not stopped thinking about him. She turns up in Chicago, finds him at the shoe store, and makes an offer: five hundred thousand dollars, paid to Peg, in exchange for Al. The family convenes to discuss it. Peg’s position is that they cannot sell Daddy, though she arrives there only after physically examining him and failing to understand the valuation. Kelly’s contribution is a sustained argument in favour of the sale, conducted almost entirely through French phrases she does not understand, and finished with a cheerleading routine. Bud makes his own case. Marcy, who has come over on the pretext of Jefferson needing product advice, uses the opportunity to question whether anyone could want Al for sex at all, and Al’s reply about her figure and Coco’s vanishing cream is the last great Al-to-Marcy insult of the season. Vanna White plays Coco, which the series had been setting up without knowing it since season 2, when Al and his friends listed her among the components of an ideal woman. As a season closer it is an odd choice, since it resolves nothing and changes nothing, but as the last thing one of the show’s two creators put his hands on, it is a fitting enough exit: Al is offered a way out, and the way out is somebody else buying him.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: May 16, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 26
• Overall episode number: 157
• Written by: Arthur Silver
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: April 30, 1993
• Production note: The season 7 finale. After this episode co-creator Ron Leavitt and writer-producer Arthur Silver left the series, going on to create Unhappily Ever After for the WB.
• Production note: Katey Sagal, Amanda Bearse and Ted McGinley all singled out working with Vanna White on this episode in the 1995 retrospective My Favorite Married.
• Title note: Named for Coco’s offer, and modelled on Indecent Proposal, which had come out that spring.

Guest Cast

• Vanna White as Coco, formerly Helen Granowinner
• Kevin Schon as Phil
• Jane Childerhose as the customer in the store

Five Hundred Thousand Dollars

The premise only works because the show never lets Al be flattered by it. Coco’s interest is real, the money is real, and Al’s response is to treat the whole thing as another thing happening to him. His description of the arrangement, that she has come to purchase him as a sex toy, is delivered as a point of order.

Kelly’s argument for the sale is one of the best things Christina Applegate does in the whole run. It is built as a legal submission in which every second phrase is a French word she has confidently mistranslated, taking in collaboration with the Germans, creamy sauces and a female deer, and it finishes with her spelling the verdict out in a cheer. It should not work and it is the funniest thing in the episode.

Al’s standing objection to Coco’s fame is worth noting, since it is the clearest statement of his own self-image the series ever gave. She may have a beauty empire, but she did not score four touchdowns in a single game, and in Al’s accounting that settles the question of who Polk High’s most famous graduate is.

Watch Ed O’Neill during the scene where Peg points out a piece of cheese on his chin and Coco eats it. He is visibly fighting not to break.

Famous Quotes

• Peg, when the children burst in: “Don’t just burst in like that! What if we’d been doing something intimate?” At which point everyone in the room laughs.
• Al, on the Polk High rankings: “The SECOND most famous graduate! I don’t think this Coco broad scored four touchdowns in a single game!”
• Marcy: “Someone wants you for sex? What do you have, a pet orangutan who’s lonely? And not picky?”
• Peg, inspecting the merchandise: “Five hundred thousand dollars for this? I don’t get it! But then I haven’t been getting it for 20 years, so what’s the difference?”
• Kelly, closing her submission: “S-E-L-L! Sellllll Daddyyy!”

Notes

• Vanna White had been mentioned on the show years earlier, in season 2’s “The Poker Game,” when Al and his friends assembled a composite ideal woman.
• Al is shown stealing another mall employee’s lunch.
• Al reveals that no woman has ever correctly ordered him a pizza with extra cheese.
• Marcy mentions holding video of Jefferson’s father fan dancing for J. Edgar Hoover.
• A goof: the mall directory outside Gary’s Shoes reads Lakeside Mall, which is the rival establishment, not Al’s New Market Mall.
• Another: the soda Al spills on himself changes position and severity in almost every shot of the scene.

Watching It

Amazon’s Prime Video catalog for season 7 does not carry an entry for this episode, so there is no direct link to offer here. It is included on the complete series DVD and Blu-ray releases and turns up in syndication packages. If Prime adds it to the season 7 listing, a link will go up here.