Season 10 Episode 1: Guess Who’s Coming to Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner
September 17, 1995
Season ten opens with a premise the series had been circling for years: what would actually happen if one of the Bundy children tried to leave. Bud, caught in a humiliating moment with a date named Jaime while his parents go rummaging around on the other side of his bedroom door, decides on the spot that he is finished living at 9764 Jeopardy Lane. Al could not be more delighted. He throws himself into the departure with the enthusiasm of a man who has been waiting two decades for exactly this, lining up movers, organizing a goodbye party, and treating the whole thing less as a milestone than as an eviction he finally gets to celebrate.
The celebration lasts about as long as Bud’s apartment search. Unable to find anything he can afford on what the Department of Vehicle Services pays him, he comes back across the lawn to a living room full of relatives crouched behind furniture, and the surprise they jump out to shout is not the one he was hoping for. Bud negotiates his way back into the house on reduced terms, taking up residence in the basement, which becomes his address for the rest of the series.
That would be enough plot for most episodes, but the premiere has a second shoe to drop. Peg’s parents have split, and her mother, that unseen, floor-shaking presence the show had been building into a running gag since the first season, arrives to move in. Al spends the back half of the half-hour absorbing the news that the one relative he fears most is now a houseguest, and the season’s central nightmare is established before the first commercial break of episode two.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: Sunday, September 17, 1995 on FOX
- Season 10, Episode 1, the tenth-season premiere
- Overall episode 212 of the series
- Taped August 25, 1995; production code 10.01
- Written by Russell Marcus
- Directed by Gerry Cohen
- The title plays on the 1967 Stanley Kramer film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
- Christina Applegate wears a long blonde wig here and through most of season ten; she had cut her hair short and dyed it red to play a role in the film Nowhere, shot during the hiatus between seasons nine and ten
- David Faustino also turns up with a noticeably shorter cut than he wore in seasons eight and nine
Guest Cast
- Tim Conway as Ephraim Wanker
- Kathleen Freeman as the voice of Peg’s Mom
- Jennifer Aspen as Jaime
- Eric Floyd as Twichy
- Gunther Jenson as Clyde
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