Season 1 Episode 6: Sixteen Years and What Do You Get

May 10, 1987

Published 05/10/87

Al and Peggy agree not to exchange gifts for their sixteenth anniversary, and neither of them can hold the line for more than a day. Peggy goes shopping. Al goes shopping. The difference is that Al’s credit card comes back over its limit at the jeweller’s counter, so he arrives home with nothing while his wife has a present for him, which turns the episode from a story about romance into one about arithmetic, and establishes the template the series would reuse nine years later in “25 Years and What Do You Get?“

That is the half-hour’s actual interest. The Bundy marriage is not short of affection in this early stretch so much as short of money, and the episode is unusually clear-eyed about the difference. Both of them want to do the right thing. Only one of them can afford to, and he is the one who was supposed to be providing. The scene at the jeweller’s is played for comedy and the humiliation underneath it is entirely real.

Two small details tie the episode into the wider series. Peggy’s car carries Illinois plate F3B 359, the same plate that had appeared on the Mustang in Al’s escape fantasy the week before, which is the show quietly puncturing that dream for anyone paying attention. And this is the first appearance of Tang, under the invented brand Tri-C, apparently a collision of Tang and Hi-C; the Bundys’ preferred beverage would keep turning up for the next decade. The jeweller, Embassy Jewels, takes its name from Embassy Communications, which produced the show’s first two seasons.