Season 4 Episode 19: Peggy Turns 300

Puggy Weaver is leaving the neighborhood, which means this is Al’s final opportunity to take his alley record. He treats the evening with appropriate ceremony, assigning Bud and Kelly the job of filming it on the grounds that too many great Bundy moments have been lost for want of a camera. Peg notes that they did have a camera on their honeymoon, and that he kept beating the flash.

Then Peg starts bowling. Strike after strike, on her own husband’s night, heading for a perfect game while he watches his record attempt evaporate. Al’s attempts to break her concentration fail, Marcy punishes him for trying by kissing him on the mouth, and by the closing minutes a real sports journalist has turned up to interview the woman about it.

The scene that matters is the one on the bench. Al gathers both children, asks them whether they understand what they are witnessing, and Bud guesses a perfect game. Al corrects him: what they are witnessing is the Bundy Curse, the thing that keeps the family from ever being happy, and there is no point fighting it, because it is what separates them from ordinary losers. It is the first time the show gives the family a cosmology, and the Curse got invoked for the next seven seasons as the explanation for everything that went wrong. It is also one of the better showcases for how the show used Peg. She is not trying to humiliate her husband here. She simply turns out to be good at something, in public, on a night he had reserved for himself, and that is enough. The episode never gives her a moment of gloating, which makes it land harder than if it had.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: March 25, 1990
• Season 4, Episode 19, and the 76th episode of the series
• Written by Katherine Green
• Directed by Tony Singletary

Guest Cast

• Michael McManus as Puggy Weaver
• Roy Firestone as himself
• Garrett Glaser as himself
• Michael O’Guinne as the bowler

The Bundy Curse, Named

Both guests playing themselves were genuine broadcasters. Roy Firestone was a working sports journalist and came back to the show later. Garrett Glaser, who interviews Al inside his fantasy sequence, was a real entertainment news correspondent at the time.

Firestone had already shared a stage with Ed O’Neill and Katey Sagal in character on The New Hollywood Squares in 1987, which makes his appearance here a quiet reunion.

Puggy Weaver does not survive the series. By season 9 Al’s team is competing for the Puggy Weaver Memorial Cup, so he died somewhere in between.

In Al’s fantasy his jersey number is 51 rather than his Polk High 33, which the episode leaves unexplained and fans have generally read as his professional number.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “Behind every successful man is a woman who didn’t marry me.” Al, toasting himself.
• Al: “Too many great Bundy moments have been lost for lack of a camera.” Peg: “We had a camera on our honeymoon. You just kept beating the flash.” The record, corrected.
• Al: “Do you know what you’re witnessing here?” Bud: “A perfect game?” Al: “No. The Bundy Curse. That’s what keeps us from being happy.” The family doctrine, stated.

Notes

• Goof: the scoring does not work. Peg is shown bowling thirteen strikes, and a perfect game caps at twelve.
• Goof: Kelly places her own birthday in February here, which contradicts both season 3 and season 7.