Season 2 Episode 16: Master the Possibilities

Al receives a box of “Yodelin’ Andy” records he never ordered, and Marcy supplies the piece of information that drives the whole episode: if something arrives in the mail unsolicited, you are legally entitled to keep it. Al takes this and runs with it considerably further than the law intends. A credit card arrives addressed to Buck, which by Marcy’s rule is now the household’s property, and the Bundys go shopping on it.

What follows is the purest expression of the show’s early economics. Given unlimited credit and no accountability, the family does not buy sensibly or extravagantly: they buy appliances, furniture and exercise equipment, the ordinary comforts of a household that has never had any. The episode is funny because the spree is so modest in ambition and so total in execution.

There is a wonderful production footnote to all of it. The series was working on a very small budget in its first two seasons, and every large item the Bundys acquire on Buck’s credit card was borrowed from the homes of the show’s own cast and crew. The furniture on screen is the furniture the people making it owned.

The episode also supplied one of the show’s most-seen images: Bud on the new exercise machine, laughing about everything Kelly is missing, which ran in the opening credits of the American syndicated prints of seasons one and two. Kelly herself does not appear: Bud reports she is out with two boys, and Peggy later places her at Grandma Wanker’s. Peggy uses Pig Latin again, this time to discuss Bud in front of him, a trick she had used on her mother in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Episode Facts

• Original air date: February 7, 1988
• Season 2, Episode 16, and the 29th episode of the series
• Written by Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
• Directed by Linda Day
• Kelly does not appear

Guest Cast

• Bill Erwin as Hiram Massey
• Debi A. Monahan as Hon
• Linda Lutz as Frieda
• Caryn Wells as Paula
• Jim Keily as the bellboy

Buck Bundy Gets a Credit Card

The scheme works exactly as long as you would expect, and the pleasure of the episode is the interval, with the family buying things and Al explaining to himself that this is fine.

A nice production detail: the show could not afford the haul it depicts, so everything Buck buys was brought in from the homes of the cast and crew.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “How am I going to come up with $111?” Peg: “Well, if you didn’t have that grilled cheese sandwich, you could have put it on your credit card.” Peg’s grasp of credit.
• Bud: “Well, it wasn’t as much as Mom’s coat!” The family defending its purchases, one against another.
• Al: “I said to Sven, you think it’s all worth it, buddy?” Al, inventing a past at a lobster warehouse.

Notes

• The title plays on the Mastercard slogan of the mid-1980s.
• Because of the early-season budget, the big-ticket items bought on Buck’s card were borrowed from the cast and crew’s own houses.
• Kelly’s absence is explained twice and differently, once as a date and once as a stay with Grandma Wanker.
• Peg uses Pig Latin again, as she did in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
• The shot of Bud laughing on the exercise machine was reused in the opening credits of the show’s remakes.