Season 9 Episode 26: The Undergraduate

The season 9 finale. Kelly has acquired a secret admirer who has been sending expensive gifts to the house, and when she finally meets him he turns out to be Robby Bennett, a spoiled and extremely wealthy twelve-year-old. Kelly turns him down on the obvious grounds, and Robby does not accept it, citing a family motto about getting what the Bennetts want. Kelly’s counter-motto is the best line in the episode. Robby’s leverage is a jeans commercial Kelly needs, and he uses it to require her attendance at his junior prom, which is how an adult woman ends up at a middle school dance being slow-danced by a child. Bud turns up too, having crashed the event disguised as the DJ, purely in order to enjoy his sister’s situation at close range, and he photographs the whole thing. He does eventually help, by calling Robby’s father, and the resolution introduces a complication nobody in the family anticipated. The episode is also a quiet turning point behind the camera: after this, co-creator Michael G. Moye stepped down as showrunner, staying on as a consultant through most of season 10 before leaving the industry altogether. The half-hour works as a two-hander between the siblings, and the script leans hard on the leverage each one holds over the other: Robby owns the embarrassing photographs, Kelly owns a secret she cannot afford to have read aloud, and Bud sits in the middle collecting a commission from everybody. That arrangement produces the episode’s most quoted exchange, a negotiation over Bud’s percentage that escalates from fifty-five to eighty the moment Kelly admits she is desperate. Around them, Al and Peggy treat the whole situation as a spectator sport, weighing in from the couch without ever offering help, which is more or less the household’s standard operating procedure by this point in the run. As a season finale it is a deliberately small story rather than a cliffhanger, closing out the ninth year on a character beat instead of a stunt, and it carries the quiet distinction of being the last episode produced while co-creator Michael G. Moye was running the show.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: May 21, 1995
• Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 26
• Overall episode number: 211
• Written by: Fran E. Kaufer
• Directed by: Amanda Bearse
• Taped: March 3, 1995, David Faustino’s twenty-first birthday
• Production note: Marcy does not appear, as Amanda Bearse directed.
• Production note: Meghan Markle appears again as an uncredited extra in the gymnasium, most visibly sitting on the stage near the end. Her father Thomas W. Markle was the show’s director of photography. This is her second appearance on the series after season 7’s “Christmas.”
• Production note: The last episode with Michael G. Moye as showrunner. He stayed on as a creative consultant for most of season 10 and wrote one more episode, “Requiem for a Dead Briard,” before leaving the industry.
• Title note: A play on The Graduate, crossed with the fact that Robby has not finished middle school.

Guest Cast

• Noah Segan as Robby Bennett
• Harry S. Murphy as Mr. Bennett
• Billy Gallo as Stitch (credited as William Gallo)
• Damien Leake as Principal Alburton
• Lynsey Bartilson as Megan
• Brad Blumenthal as the refreshment guy
• Bert L. Cook as the delivery man
• Meghan Markle as a student (uncredited)

The Bennett Family Motto

The exchange of family mottos is the sharpest writing in the episode and it gives Kelly the win. Robby invokes the Bennett creed about seeing something, wanting it and getting it, and Kelly’s version of the Bundy equivalent is both funnier and a more accurate description of how that household operates.

Bud’s decision to attend the dance is pure spite and the episode is honest about it. He has no intention of helping. He wants photographs. His running commentary and his willingness to read aloud from his sister’s diary in front of a gymnasium full of twelve-year-olds is as petty as the character ever got, and he does eventually make the phone call that rescues her.

Noah Segan, who plays Robby, went on to a substantial career in independent film, including several Rian Johnson pictures, among them Looper and Knives Out. Lynsey Bartilson, one of the children at the dance, later starred in FOX’s Grounded for Life.

Jefferson’s advice to Kelly about dancing with someone considerably shorter than her, framed as useful preparation for her future show business career, is the best thing he says in the episode, mostly for the list of names he chooses.

A detail for crew-spotters: a campaign poster in the gymnasium reads “Kim Weiskopf for Student Class President.” Weiskopf was a co-executive producer and writer on the series, and the voice of Buck at the time.

Famous Quotes

• Kelly: “Guess what my secret admirer brought for me today! Twelve long-stemmed roses!” Peg: “Al, how come you never send me roses?” Al: “I don’t like you, Peg.”
• Robby: “The Bennett family motto is: ‘We see it, we want it, we get it’.” Kelly: “Well, the Bundy family motto is: ‘It sees us, insults us, we kick its ass’.”
• Kelly, to her manager: “Bud, you’re my manager. You’re supposed to be opening doors for me. Now, what am I paying you 55% for?” Bud: “How was I supposed to know you were gonna start saying ‘No’ to men?”
• Jefferson, offering perspective: “So you dance with a guy who comes up to your navel. It’ll prepare you for later on in your showbiz career when you’re dancing with Stallone or Cruise or k.d. Lang.”
• Kelly: “It’s just a junior prom. I can do this with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back.” Bud: “That’s sort of like one of your real dates then, right?”

Notes

• Al sings “Movin’ On Up” at the end of the episode, two seasons after the Jeffersons episode that gave the series that joke.
• Bert L. Cook, from the show’s production staff, plays the delivery man in the opening scene.
• Goofs: both Christina Applegate and Noah Segan visibly break during the scene where Bud photographs them through the door panel, and Al acquires a mouthful of food between consecutive shots at the dinner table.