Season 8 Episode 12: A Little Off the Top

Al hurts his back playing football with Aaron Mitchell and his friends, and the doctor’s recommendation is a minor procedure: a small circular incision in the lower back to take the pressure off his spine. Peg’s reaction to the news is one of her better extended demolitions, taking in a proposed career for him in the circus and a bell tower before she concedes that both would pay better than selling shoes. Al goes in. The surgical team misreads the instruction. Instead of a circular incision, Al receives a circumcision, and the scene in which Peg learns this, mid-phone-call to Marcy from a hospital payphone, is the best-constructed sequence in the episode. She is in the middle of telling Marcy that the odds of anything going wrong are negligible when the doctor arrives to tell her something has gone wrong, and she keeps Marcy on the line throughout. The doctor’s reassurance about Al’s ability to return to work is brutal even by this show’s standards. Where they have put him afterwards is the punchline. The rest of the episode is the family attempting to keep a recovering Al calm and unexcited, which involves Bud hiding the magazines in the basement, and it ends with one of the very few occasions in eleven seasons on which Al Bundy actively wants to go to bed with his wife. It is one of the most notorious episodes of the run and one of the very few where the show’s willingness to go somewhere no other network sitcom would is the entire point of the exercise rather than a garnish on it.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: December 12, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 12
• Overall episode number: 169
• Written by: Michael G. Moye
• Directed by: Sam W. Orender
• Production note: The premise is thought to have come from a rough draft written back in season 4 that FOX rejected during the fallout from the Terry Rakolta boycott.
• Title note: A haircut phrase doing double duty as a description of the plot.

Guest Cast

• Hill Harper as Aaron Mitchell
• Ron Perkins as the doctor
• Mark Clayman as Jay
• Terence Paul Winter as the waiter (credited as Terence Winter)
• Don Maxwell as the dad

A Circular Incision

The payphone scene is a small masterclass in sitcom construction. Peg sets up the irony herself, out loud, to a third party, and the doctor walks into frame on the exact beat. Her decision to keep Marcy on the line, and to relay Marcy’s request that the doctor speak up, is the detail that makes it.

The doctor’s line about Al’s capacity to keep working is the single harshest joke in the episode and it is not even aimed at the injury. Asked whether her husband will ever work again, he points out that Al is a shoe salesman and that they could replace his brain with a sock full of popcorn without affecting his performance.

Peg’s riff on what Al will be fit for after the operation is Katey Sagal at her most fluent, and the closing turn, where she grants that the circus and the bell tower both pay better than Gary’s Shoes, is the kind of insult this show could land as affection.

The episode has an unexpectedly sweet ending, in that Al spends the whole thing being managed and prevented and finishes it genuinely interested in his wife. The show cues up “Bad to the Bone” for it, which is the only reasonable choice.

Terence Paul Winter, credited here as the waiter, went on to write for The Sopranos and to create Boardwalk Empire.

Famous Quotes

• Peg, on hearing Al needs surgery: “Good going, crazy legs. Now you need an operation!” Al: “I’M FINE! DON’T YOU SEE I’M FINE?!”
• Peg, speculating on his future: “Fine for what, Al? Starring in the circus as ‘Bundo The Fiddler Crab Boy’? Ringing bells in a clock tower somewhere? Granted, they’re both higher paying jobs than the one you have now.”
• Peg, into the payphone: “I say, ‘Look, it’s a simple operation. What are the odds of something horrible happening to you?’” The doctor, arriving: “Excuse me, Mrs. Bundy, but something horrible has happened to your husband.”
• Peg: “Will he ever be able to work again?” Doctor: “He’s a shoe salesman, Mrs. Bundy. We could replace his brain with a sock full of popcorn, he would still be able to work again.”
• The doctor, explaining: “It seems our surgical team misread your doctor’s instructions. It said to give him a ‘circular incision’.” Peg: “So how could you misread that?”

Notes

• Peg mentions that she licks her fingers to turn magazine pages, something she had been seen doing back in season 2’s “Father Lode.”
• Peg and Marcy are using a Thighmaster in the opening scene.
• The plot got an oblique nod years later on The King of Queens, which shared a production company with this series.
• When Bud goes into the basement to hide the magazines, the wall lamp beside the door very nearly comes off its mounting on the sound of his fall.