Steve Rhoades
Steven “Steve” Bartholomew Rhoades (David Garrison) is Marcy’s first husband. Much like the name “Bundy” the creators chose the surname “Rhoades” after professional wrestler Dusty Rhodes, a good-guy character who worked opposite bad guys like King Kong Bundy. He is a banker who seems unfazed by his lower position than Marcy at the city bank. (When Marcy moves up to a high position at another bank, he gets her former job.) Steve initially condescends to the Bundys, but eventually becomes more like them, and generally turns to Al for male-bonding. Marcy was initially attracted to him because of his self-centered materialism.
Steve seemed to be a fairly demure and buttoned-down character, compared to his wife and the Bundys, although he did show a dark side. As a banker, Steve took sadistic pleasure in humiliating people who bullied him in high school by making his former tormentors (many of whom were stuck in poor, dead-end jobs similar to Al’s) grovel for bank loans, which he flatly refused. Steve also got his job as Dean of Bud’s college by blackmailing the man who employed him as a chauffeur.
Steve was written out of the show in the middle of the fourth season; Garrison had decided he no longer wanted to be tied down to a weekly television series, preferring to avoid being typecast in one role, and devote more time to his first love: stage acting. He reached an agreement with FOX to buy out the remainder of his contract. In the final episode shot, (though confusingly, not the final episode aired) in which he was a regular character, Steve is disenchanted with his and Marcy’s yuppie lifestyle, and is increasingly interested in becoming an outdoorsman (a real-life interest of Garrison’s). He then disappears, with the explanation that he left Marcy to become a forest ranger at Yosemite National Park. Prior to disappearing he loses his job at the bank, after, in desire to win a free trip to Hawaii, he approves a loan for Al’s “shoe hotline” project which fails. His last job was as a “pooper scooper” at an exotic pet shop. In later seasons, Garrison would reprise the Steve Rhoades character on four occasions, returning to guest star in individual episodes (with Steve having pursued other careers in the meantime), as he eventually returns to professional life to become the Dean of Bud’s college. This episode was to be the pilot of a spin-off series that never happened.
