Season 11 Episode 7: The Juggs Have Left the Building

December 1, 1996

Published 12/01/96

The Bundys take a family holiday to Branson, Missouri, which is a real destination built on theatrical music and variety shows and therefore exactly the right place to send them. The accommodation sets the tone: Al negotiates for the best room twenty dollars and a bag of aluminium cans will buy, the clerk at the Deliverance Inn promises hospitality that will make them squeal, and the suite he recommends is named after Ned Beatty and has a back door. Bud asks to go home ten minutes into the trip. Al’s position is that he has already made a friend.

Peggy and Kelly’s ambition is to perform as a mother-daughter country act called The Juggs, in the mould of The Judds, and they get as far as a stage and a cover of “Rockin’ With the Rhythm of the Rain.” Tammy Wynette appears as herself and delivers the episode’s best one-line dismissal, taking Peggy’s claim that the two of them are more like a sister act and asking whether they do comedy as well. It was Wynette’s last live-action acting credit; she died in April 1998, aged 55.

The better half of the episode stays in Chicago. Marcy and Jefferson are house-sitting and feeding Lucky, and Marcy, bored of their usual Saturday repertoire, decides she wants something dirty, trashy and cheap. What they land on is dressing in Al and Peggy’s clothes and playing Al and Peggy, which gives Ted McGinley and Amanda Bearse a full scene of impersonating their co-stars, complete with the entrance, the coat, and the question about dinner. It is the funniest thing in the episode and arguably in the season.

Episode Facts

Original air date: Sunday, December 1, 1996 on FOX
Season 11, Episode 7
Overall episode 245 of the series
Production code 11.08
Written by Vince Cheung and Ben Montanio
Directed by Gerry Cohen
The title combines the country duo The Judds with the phrase “Elvis has left the building”
Tammy Wynette’s final live-action acting credit; this episode has no epilogue