Season 10 Episode 13: I Can’t Believe It’s Butter

The series’ last Christmas episode, and it builds its holiday around a phone sex line. Griff has become attached to an operator who calls herself Butter, and Al makes the discovery that Butter is Peg’s mother, working the line from upstairs. The money is real: her earnings are what is paying for the Bundys’ Christmas, since the Christmas Club fund Al had been hiding in a sock turned out to contain nothing but receipts for strudel and a heavy-duty exercise device. For once the household has presents, and the price is that Al has to keep a secret from his only friend.

The secret stops being manageable when Griff tells Al he wants to ask Butter out. The sequence that follows is the episode’s centrepiece: Griff on the Bundy living room phone, Peggy upstairs doing Butter’s voice, and Al standing over her trying to coach a gentle rejection while Peggy becomes visibly interested in Griff’s offer of dinner, dancing and a sleigh ride to an airport motel. The scene gets to run long and it earns every second, because the audience knows exactly how many ways it can go wrong.

Underneath the farce the episode is doing something the show rarely did, which is let the Bundys actually have a decent Christmas, and then make Al choose between it and his friend’s feelings. The holiday material is played mostly straight: “Deck the Halls” turns up three times, there is a proper Christmas Eve meal, and the cruelty is reserved for the gift-giving scene at the top, where Al works out that the fund is empty and offers both his children a handshake instead. It is also the final appearance of Kathleen Freeman as the voice of Peg’s mother.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Wednesday, December 13, 1995 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 13
• Overall episode 225 of the series
• Taped November 17, 1995; production code 10.14
• Written by Scott Zimbler and Joel Valentincic
• Directed by Sam W. Orender
• The title plays on the spread I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!
• The last Christmas episode of the series, and the final appearance of Kathleen Freeman as the voice of Peg’s Mom

Guest Cast

• Jennifer Martin as Butter
• Danica Sheridan as Belinda
• Venessia Valentino as Cindy
• Dijon Williams as Bobby

The Griff Who Stole Christmas

The episode’s engine is a secret with a deadline, which is the most reliable structure a sitcom has. Al knows who Butter is, Griff does not, and every scene after the discovery tightens the screw. What makes it more than mechanical is that Al’s motive is not self-interest for once: the money is paying for his family’s Christmas and his friend is about to be humiliated, and the two obligations point in opposite directions.

The phone call is staged as a three-way scene across two floors, and it works because each participant wants something different: Griff wants a yes, Al wants a soft no, and Peggy, doing the voice, starts to want the sleigh ride. Katey Sagal plays the drift from performance to genuine interest without overselling it, and Al’s increasingly frantic coaching from over her shoulder does the rest.

NO MA’AM’s collective relationship with the line is the episode’s best running gag, mostly through the aliases. Al is Double O Shoe, Griff is Shoehorn O’ Plenty, Ike is Hot Pants, Bob Rooney is Butcher Boy, Officer Dan is Psycho Cop, and Jefferson is Ken Doll. Six grown men with code names, calling the same woman, none of them aware she lives at the end of the street.

Famous Quotes

• Bud: “Dad, why do we go through this pathetic charade every year? You know darn well Mom’s jimmied the lock and spent all the money on herself.” / Peg: “I didn’t spend one penny on myself this year.”
• Al: “Five hundred dollars for JJ’s House of Strudel. Two hundred dollars for a heavy-duty Buttmaster.” / Peg: “Everybody knows that strudel goes straight to the butt.”
• Kelly: “What about us?” / Al: “Oh, this doesn’t affect your gift, pumpkin.” Then shakes her hand. “Merry Christmas.”
• Griff: “I’d make it a Christmas you’d never forget. Dinner. Dancing. A sleigh ride to the airport Motel 6 where I would rock your world.” With Peggy on the other end, twirling the cord.
• Peg (as Butter): “I’d love to, Mr. O’ Plenty, but it’s against company policy. You see, we phone-sex employees live by the highest moral and ethical standards.”

Notes

• Al had kept a Christmas Club account once before, at the Kyoto National Bank, in season four’s “It’s a Bundyful Life.” A Christmas Club was a real product, a short-term savings account paid out just before the holidays, usually at a poor interest rate.
• The NO MA’AM aliases echo the pet names used in the Woody Woodpecker short “A Fine Feathered Frenzy.”
• “Deck the Halls” appears three times: hummed by Ike at the shoe store, as an instrumental over the Christmas Eve meal, and sung by NO MA’AM arriving at the house near the end.
• Goof: Griff lifts a glass that is supposed to hold gravy and it is visibly empty.
• Goof: the upstairs phone has a bell ring when Al calls the line and an electronic one when Griff does.
• Goof: the dinner rolls and Peggy’s bib move around the table repeatedly through the Christmas Eve scene.