Season 11 Episode 7: The Juggs Have Left the Building

The Bundys take a family holiday to Branson, Missouri, which is a real destination built on theatrical music and variety shows and therefore exactly the right place to send them. The accommodation sets the tone: Al negotiates for the best room twenty dollars and a bag of aluminium cans will buy, the clerk at the Deliverance Inn promises hospitality that will make them squeal, and the suite he recommends is named after Ned Beatty and has a back door. Bud asks to go home ten minutes into the trip. Al’s position is that he has already made a friend.

Peggy and Kelly’s ambition is to perform as a mother-daughter country act called The Juggs, in the mould of The Judds, and they get as far as a stage and a cover of “Rockin’ With the Rhythm of the Rain.” Tammy Wynette appears as herself and delivers the episode’s best one-line dismissal, taking Peggy’s claim that the two of them are more like a sister act and asking whether they do comedy as well. It was Wynette’s last live-action acting credit; she died in April 1998, aged 55.

The better half of the episode stays in Chicago. Marcy and Jefferson are house-sitting and feeding Lucky, and Marcy, bored of their usual Saturday repertoire, decides she wants something dirty, trashy and cheap. What they land on is dressing in Al and Peggy’s clothes and playing Al and Peggy, which gives Ted McGinley and Amanda Bearse a full scene of impersonating their co-stars, complete with the entrance, the coat, and the question about dinner. It is the funniest thing in the episode and arguably in the season.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, December 1, 1996 on FOX
• Season 11, Episode 7
• Overall episode 245 of the series
• Production code 11.08
• Written by Vince Cheung and Ben Montanio
• Directed by Gerry Cohen
• The title combines the country duo The Judds with the phrase “Elvis has left the building”
• Tammy Wynette’s final live-action acting credit; this episode has no epilogue

Guest Cast

• Tammy Wynette as herself
• Brent Hinkley as Cletus
• Ritchie Montgomery as the Emcee
• Nicole Nagorsky as the Daughter
• Doug Reid as Buford
• Dan Reid as Elmo

Marcy and Jefferson Play the Bundys

The role-play scene is the episode’s reason to exist. Marcy wants novelty, rejects the Romanian gymnastics coach on the grounds that they did it last week, rejects another suggestion for involving too much talking, and settles on the thing in the house that strikes her as genuinely sordid: being the neighbours. What follows is Amanda Bearse and Ted McGinley doing Katey Sagal and Ed O’Neill, the walk down the stairs, the coat on the hook, the defeated “I’m home”. And the writing is affectionate enough that the imitation lands as a tribute rather than a sketch.

Branson gives the episode its other register, and the Deliverance Inn material is about as broad as the series ever went. The clerk’s every line is a Deliverance reference delivered directly at Bud, who understands all of them, and Al’s refusal to notice is the joke underneath. The show had sent the family on the road before, to Dumpwater and to England, and the formula is unchanged: the destination is awful, the accommodation is worse, and Al considers the whole thing a bargain.

Tammy Wynette’s appearance carries more weight now than it did at the time. She was one of the most important voices in country music and this was the last live-action work she did; she recorded voice parts for two episodes of King of the Hill before her death from cardiac arrhythmia complications in 1998. The casting also makes a quiet joke about Katey Sagal, a professional singer who had worked as a backing vocalist for Bette Midler, Gene Simmons and Bob Dylan; in this episode she is required to be bad at it.

Famous Quotes

• Cletus: “Welcome to the Deliverance Inn! You’ll squeal like a pig at our hospitality! Especially you.”
• Al: “We’re on a family vacation and we want the best accommodation twenty bucks and these aluminum cans will buy.” / Cletus: “May I suggest the ‘Ned Beatty’ suite? It’s got a back door.”
• Bud: “Dad… I wanna go home now.” / Al: “What do you mean you want to go home now?! It’s great here! We’ve only been here 10 minutes, you made a new friend.”
• Jefferson: “I can’t believe they didn’t lock their door.” / Marcy: “Would you lock a landfill?”
• Jefferson: “‘The Romanian coach and the limping gymnast’?” / Marcy: “We did that last week.”
• Jefferson (as Al): “Gee, where’s dinner?” / Marcy (as Peg): “Working its way through my small intestine.” / Jefferson: “I’m surprised any part of your body is willing to work.”

Notes

• Tammy Wynette died in April 1998, aged 55, less than two years after this aired. She recorded voice work for two episodes of King of the Hill after this.
• Katey Sagal is a professional singer who has worked as a backing vocalist for Bette Midler, Gene Simmons and Bob Dylan.
• The Juggs perform a cover of the 1986 country single “Rockin’ With the Rhythm of the Rain.”
• Kelly mimes playing an Ovation Celebrity Deluxe six-string.
• Goof: Kelly’s Japanese phrase, offered as “can we try it topless,” actually translates as roughly “can you raise your feet behind your ears?”
• Goof: the studio lighting rig is visible when the camera pans down as Kelly and Peg begin to sing.
• Goof: Peggy’s posture and expression change between cuts during Wynette’s “Oh, you do comedy too?” line.