Married with Children: The Secret Behind Kelly Bundy’s ‘Bleen’ Joke

So we’re doing our third Bundy Breakdown watch party, right? Me and the No Ma’am guys, Griff, Bob Rooney, Ike, the whole crew, plus we dragged Richard Gurman in from the writers’ room. And the second episode we picked for everybody to watch was “How Bleen Was My Kelly.” If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this and go watch it first, because I’m about to spoil the whole thing.

Here’s the deal. Kelly, played by the incredible Christina Applegate, decides she’s going to become a scientist. Now if you know Kelly Bundy, you know this is already heading somewhere beautiful. She’s in a lab, mixing chemicals, and she comes up with what she thinks is the greatest invention of all time. A brand new color. Not blue. Not green. Something in between. She calls it “Bleen.”

That right there is one of those jokes that only our show could pull off. The writers took Kelly’s particular brand of genius and turned it into a whole episode. The solution she creates ends up getting used as shampoo, and suddenly Al and all the No Ma’am guys have these incredible heads of hair. We’re talking full, flowing locks. One of the guys was shooting in Mexico and came back late, and when he walked in, everyone already had their crazy hairstyles on. They threw a Don King wig on him and dragged him back onto the set.

But here’s the thing that made it truly one of the funniest episodes in the run. The side effect of this magic shampoo was that it made the guys actually want to be intimate with their wives. And if you know anything about Al Bundy and the No Ma’am philosophy, that’s basically the worst thing that could happen to them. So they had to find a way to uninvent the whole thing. The cure was worse than the disease, as far as Al was concerned.

Richard Gurman, who was the co-executive producer and writer for most of the show’s run, popped into our watch party when we were talking about this one. He said the killer concept was exactly that side effect. The hair was the setup, the desire was the punchline, and the scramble to undo it was the whole third act. Classic Married with Children structure.

What most people don’t know about this episode is that Amanda Bearse directed it. And Amanda had this tradition where every time she directed an episode, she’d give the cast members a little gift. For “How Bleen Was My Kelly,” she had custom crayons made. The box has “Married with Children” on one side and “How Bleen Was My Kelly” on the other. I still have mine somewhere around here. Those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes details you only get from the people who were actually there.

Ed Bell’s reactions throughout this episode are some of the best physical comedy in the whole series. His expressions every time the side effect kicked in were absolutely priceless. The guy committed to every single take.

This is exactly the kind of stuff we dig into at the Bundy Club watch parties. The No Ma’am guys brought stories I hadn’t heard in thirty years, Richard Gurman dropped writer’s room secrets, and the fans in the Zoom were losing their minds watching it all unfold in real time.

Not a Bundy Club member yet? Get in here. The free tier gives you a peek at the community, and the paid tiers put you on the couch with us for the watch parties where stories like this one come out. Join up at bundyclub.com/join and stop watching from the outside.