Season 10 Episode 16: Calendar Girl

February 4, 1996

Published 02/04/96

Bud needs a project for his marketing class and lands on a calendar featuring the girls of Trumaine, an idea he gets from Kelly after she turns up with a men’s calendar of her own. The shoot is staged at Gary’s Shoes, scored to Neil Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl,” and Al invests ten dollars in it, which in his accounting represents hundreds of thousands in projected returns. The problem is the cover girl. Crystal Clark will not commit, and her reason is one she cannot bring herself to say out loud: she is worried about what her parents will think if the calendar goes national.

Bud’s solution is to be sincere with her, a tactic he finds almost physically difficult: he describes complete honesty as going against everything he stands for, and about as unnatural as talking to a man. It works. Crystal agrees, telling him the calendar might be a way to let her parents know she has finally become a woman, and the episode drops several more hints of the same shape before the reveal arrives during her television interview. The final image is Bud kneeling in front of a television showing nothing but static, and the show lets it run under the closing credits in place of the usual freeze frame.

This is also where Peggy leaves. Katey Sagal was pregnant with her second child during production, and rather than write around her on the set the series sent Peg off in search of her runaway father, keeping her in the show by telephone from increasingly expensive locations. She stays away for the rest of season ten and returns in the finale. It was the second time the series had solved a Sagal pregnancy by getting Peggy out of Chicago.

Episode Facts

Original air date: Sunday, February 4, 1996 on FOX
Season 10, Episode 16
Overall episode 228 of the series
Production code 10.17
Written by Amanda Bearse
Directed by Fran E. Kaufer
The title refers both to Bud’s project and to the Neil Sedaka song, which scores the photo shoot
Peggy departs the household here and does not return until the season finale