Season 1 Episode 2: Thinnergy

April 12, 1987

Published 04/12/87

Marcy lends Peggy a diet book called Thinnergy, on the understanding that it will improve her sex life, and Peggy’s response is to put the entire household on it. The plot is thin on purpose. What the episode is actually doing, two weeks into the series, is installing the weapon both Bundys would spend eleven seasons pointing at each other: withholding. Peggy controls the food. Al controls everything else he can reach. Neither of them will concede, and the diet becomes a siege.

The episode is an early marker for a surprising number of the show’s fixtures. It is the first time Al’s eventual default posture, alone on the couch, sunk into the cushions, immovable, begins to appear as something more than a man sitting down. It is the first time Peggy makes a joke about her own satisfaction without her husband’s involvement, a register the series would return to for a decade. And it is the first time the audience is shown Al and Peggy’s bedroom, which the show had so far kept offstage.

Steve’s contribution is a nod to the previous week: he reminds Al that he has already got him into trouble with Marcy once, which is the series’ first act of continuity, delivered in episode two. Bud supplies another piece of household history that would be referenced for years, mentioning that Kelly has been held back a grade. The title is a pun doing double duty: the book’s invented brand name, and a play on synergy, which is roughly the opposite of what the Bundy diet produces.