Season 2 Episode 1: Poppy’s by the Tree, Part 1

The series’ first two-part episode, and its first holiday. The Bundys drive to Dumpwater, Florida, a fictional town the map places near Lake City, with a name that reads as a direct insult to Clearwater, and check into a cut-rate motel called Poppy’s by the Tree. The name is a joke on the “by the Sea” convention of Florida beachfront resorts, and there is no sea. There is, however, an axe murderer who has turned up at the motel every five years since 1962 and does not care for tourists, and the locals have started taking bets on which of the Bundys he will get.

The episode opens in black and white for a flashback to the earlier killings, captioned as such, which is a formal flourish the series rarely attempted and never bettered. From there it settles into something closer to a horror pastiche than a sitcom: the family installed in rooms 21 and 22, the townspeople cheerfully unhelpful, and the threat treated as a local tradition rather than an emergency.

As the first Bundy holiday it sets a template the show returned to for a decade: the destination is terrible, the accommodation is worse, and the danger is real. Season six’s England trilogy follows the same shape. The episode also marks the point where the house itself changed: the second-season titles use an updated exterior shot after the Bundy home was repainted from orange to white. And for the first time the end credits drop the usual still of Al and Peggy on the couch, substituting a frame of the family walking into Poppy’s.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: September 27, 1987
• Season 2, Episode 1, the season premiere, and the 14th episode of the series
• Part one of two, and the first two-parter the show ever did
• Originally broadcast as a single hour alongside part two
• Written by Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
• Directed by Linda Day

Guest Cast

• Gary Grubbs as Delbert
• Richard Paul as the sheriff
• Charlie Dell as Roy
• Ian Patrick Williams as Beany
• Kim Morgan Greene as Becky
• Becky Phelps as Gloria
• Dan Gauthier as Kelly’s boyfriend

Dumpwater, Florida

Season 2 opens by sending the show somewhere it had never gone: a genre. This is a slasher pastiche with a laugh track, opening in black and white for the flashback murders, and it commits properly. It is also the first time the writers figured out that the Bundys work best when the world around them is worse than they are.

It set two precedents that stuck. The show would keep doing ambitious two-parters, and it would keep taking the family out of Chicago to places that punished them. Part two is here.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “Now I know this isn’t your first choice for a vacation.” Bud: “Till this show, dad?” Bud, pre-emptively.
• Al: “We’re poor, so we’re going to Dumpwater, Florida!” Al, selling it.
• Becky: “I picked this towel special for you. Don’t tell anybody that I gave it to you.” The motel’s service standard, for twenty dollars.

Notes

• “By the Tree” is a joke on the Florida resort habit of calling everything “by the Sea.” Dumpwater is fictional, but the map in the episode puts it near Lake City.
• Al and Peg are in room 21, Bud and Kelly in room 22.
• The flashback is captioned and shot in black and white, the first time the show changed film stock for a gag.
• Goof: the hole in Al and Peg’s bed, which the machete comes up through at the end, is visible for the entire episode.
• Goof: Bud asks for an unopened can of Coke and it arrives already open.