Season 11 Episode 16: Breaking Up is Easy to Do (3)

The conclusion gives Bruce a chance to lose on his own merits, and he takes it. Having installed himself in Peggy’s life, he starts proposing changes, to the house, to the children, to the way things are done, and the family’s tolerance evaporates. It is a smart way to resolve the story: nobody has to argue that Al is better, only that Bruce is worse, and the Bundys close ranks around a standard of living they have no intention of raising.

Al’s campaign to get back in is conducted through pretexts. He turns up claiming to be visiting Lucky rather than his wife, and asks Jefferson whether the dog was supposed to be bigger, Jefferson’s correction, that it was Buck who was bigger, is one of the very few times the series mentioned the dog after his death in “Requiem for a Dead Briard.” The scene preceding it is the best writing in the three-parter: Al, sporting a black eye from a jealous boyfriend, delivering a confident account of his success with women and then immediately retracting every detail of it to Griff.

The episode’s centrepiece is a long montage of Peggy remembering her marriage, assembled from fourteen clips spanning seasons two through eleven, Al pushing the Dodge into the garage, Al attempting to hang himself with the telephone cord, Peggy brushing his teeth and armpits with the same toothbrush, the game show where she electrocuted him. It is the closest thing the series made to a highlight reel of the marriage, and the fact that she finds all of it fond is the joke and the answer at once.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Monday, March 3, 1997 on FOX
• Season 11, Episode 16, part three of three
• Overall episode 254 of the series
• Taped January 31, 1997; production code 11.18
• Written by Russell Marcus
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title plays on Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”
• First aired on David Faustino’s 23rd birthday; no epilogue

Guest Cast

• Alan Thicke as Bruce
• Michael Irpino as the Clerk

Peggy’s Montage

The montage is the reason this episode is worth seeking out. Fourteen clips, drawn from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, “Oh, What a Feeling“, “Proud to Be Your Bud”, “I Who Have Nothing“, “A Babe in Toyland“, “Wedding Show”, “Just Married… with Children“, “Un-Alful Entry“, “Kids! Wadaya Gonna Do?“, “Hot off the Grill“, “The Chicago Wine Party” and the then-current season, assembled as a woman’s fond recollection of her husband. Almost every clip shows him being awful or being injured. That Peggy remembers it as romance is the series’ thesis stated in pictures rather than dialogue.

There is a production curiosity in it: two of the clips come from “A Babe in Toyland,” an episode that had not yet aired when this one was broadcast. It would turn up two weeks later, which means the montage spoiled footage from an episode still to come.

Bruce’s defeat is handled economically. The show does not make him cruel or expose him as a fraud; he simply has opinions about how the household might be improved, and the Bundys experience those opinions as an attack. Al wins by default and by persistence, and the resolution of the series’ only real separation storyline comes down to the family preferring its own squalor, which is, in the end, the only answer eleven seasons could have supported.

Famous Quotes

• Jefferson: “Oh, Al, that’s a beaut.” / Griff: “I haven’t seen a shiner that bad since I told my wife that she was starting to look like Al Roker.”
• Jefferson: “Marcy said that it was only a matter of time before some woman beat the holy hell out of you.” / Al: “I got this black eye last night, explaining to a jealous boyfriend how the little lady would rather stay with me.”
• Al: “I sent her out shopping for a new waterbed. This one has a leak and I worry so when she bounces.”
• Griff: “Is it true, Al? About the girl?” / Al: “Every word of it! Except that the guy’s name was ‘Sasquatch,’ the girl left with him, and there’s an odor coming from that waterbed that scares even me!”
• Peg: “We have been married for 25 years.” / Al: “Since you were eighteen and I was, uh, nine.” Or words to that effect, the arithmetic having long since stopped mattering.

Notes

• Jefferson’s correction that Buck was the bigger dog is one of the series’ rare references to Buck after his death in season ten’s “Requiem for a Dead Briard.”
• Two of the montage clips come from “A Babe in Toyland,” which did not air until two weeks after this episode.
• Alan Thicke had previously appeared in season ten’s “Enemies” as Henry.
• Goof: Peggy’s twenty-five-years line conflicts with season nine’s “25 Years and What Do You Get?“, which marked the same anniversary two years earlier.
• Goof: the steaks Peggy is holding move from her hands to the stove between consecutive shots.
• Goof: in the supermarket scene, the actor playing the clerk can be seen warming up behind Marcy and glancing off camera for his cue.