Season 1 Episode 9: Peggy Sue Got Work

May 31, 1987

Published 05/31/87

Al will not buy Peggy a VCR, so Peggy takes a job selling clocks in a department store and buys it herself. The first half is about what that does to Al, who discovers that his wife’s absence has removed the only thing standing between him and his children. The second half is the part that holds up: both Al and Peggy independently conclude that they want her to come home, and neither of them will say so, because saying so means conceding the original argument about the VCR.

The episode is the first time Peggy gets a job, a device the series would return to repeatedly and always resolve the same way: she goes back to the couch, and the couch is treated as a victory rather than a defeat. What makes this first attempt interesting is that she is not bad at the work. The job is dull and the money is real, and the problem is simply that the Bundy household cannot function with an adult missing from it.

Small details place the episode very precisely. Her new manager mentions that her first day falls the day before Daylight Saving Time begins, which in 1987 was Sunday, April 5, the same day the pilot aired, which suggests this half-hour was shot around then despite going out ninth. It is also the first instance of a running joke the series never tired of: Al’s name misspelled by someone who should know better, printed on his own cheque as “Al Bumby.” Two of the guest cast had worked with the show’s creators before, Ernie Sabella on It’s Your Move and Irwin Keyes on The Jeffersons, where he played a character named Hugo, which is why he is Mr. Hugo here.