Season 10 Episode 5: How Bleen Was My Kelly

Kelly invents something by accident, which is the only way anyone in this house ever invents anything. Mixing products with no particular goal in mind, she produces a brand-new color she names “Bleen,” and the discovery is treated by the family with the mixture of disbelief and opportunism that any Bundy windfall receives. Bud installs himself as her agent, as he had the previous season, and the episode’s running negotiation over his percentage becomes the thread that ties the two halves together. The commission he quoted her in “The Undergraduate” was fifty-five percent; here the figure has settled at seventy-five, which tells you everything about how the sibling relationship has developed.

What makes the formula valuable is not the color. Al discovers that the stuff also grows hair, and for a man who has spent a decade enduring the indignities of Gary’s Shoes, a bottle of instant hair is the first piece of luck he has ever been handed. He tries it, it works, and he spends a glorious few minutes admiring himself in the living room while Peggy raises the obvious question about side effects. Al dismisses her with a list of products that were marketed without adequate testing, and the script lets him have exactly that long before the side effects arrive.

The side effects are the joke, and they run in the direction Al least wants: the formula makes him compliment his wife, then express a sincere desire to take her upstairs, each statement followed by a horrified demand to know who said that. Bud undergoes a series of transformations of his own, scored to an instrumental “Black or White.” Amanda Bearse directed, which is why Marcy is absent for the half-hour, and the episode closes out the show’s first stretch of season ten with a straightforward mad-science farce rather than anything resembling a plot complication.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, October 15, 1995 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 5
• Overall episode 216 of the series
• Production code 10.05
• Written by Daniel O’Keefe
• Directed by Amanda Bearse
• The title plays on the 1941 John Ford drama How Green Was My Valley, which the series had already riffed on once with “How Green Was My Apple“
• Marcy does not appear, as Amanda Bearse was behind the camera

Guest Cast

• Gene Wolande as the Scientist
• Barbara Baldieri as the Sexy Woman
• Joseph G. Medalis as Bald NO MA’AM Guy #1
• George Hirschmann as Bald NO MA’AM Guy #2

Bleen, and the Side Effects Nobody Checked

The hair-growth formula is a classic sitcom engine, and the episode runs it correctly: establish the want, grant it, then reveal the cost. What is specific to this show is what the cost turns out to be. A hair tonic with an embarrassing side effect could have gone a hundred directions: the script picks affection. Al’s punishment for vanity is that he becomes briefly, involuntarily nice to his wife, and he reacts to each outburst as if something has crawled out of his mouth. Peggy, for her part, treats it as the best thing that has happened to the marriage in years, which is both funny and faintly sad.

Kelly’s side of the story works as a late-run showcase. The character had long since passed from dim to confidently dim, and the episode leans into the gap between her total lack of understanding and her complete comfort being interviewed about her discovery. Her conversation with the scientist, who studies how much alcohol a rat can consume before it explodes and confirms the work is grant-funded, is the sharpest exchange in the half-hour, mostly because Kelly follows it perfectly well.

Bud’s role is agent and lab rat simultaneously, which is about right for him. He explains Madame Curie to Kelly, takes his cut, handles the family finances on a computer nobody else in the house can operate, and then absorbs a montage of transformations for his trouble. Amanda Bearse’s direction keeps the physical comedy tight, and the Fox viewing-positions gag from season nine’s “No Pot to Pease In” makes a return appearance.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “Peg, if you’re gonna live here, could you shut your mouth?” His answer to being asked to close the front door after kicking it open with two bags of dog food in his arms.
• Bud: “Well, luckily, Dad, I’ve put all the family finances right here in this computer.” / Al: “You put something I don’t have into something I don’t understand.” Al checking where his paycheck goes.
• Kelly: “So, what’s your field?” / Scientist: “Alchogorentology… It’s a study of that age old question: How much booze can a rat drink before he explodes?” / Kelly: “Oh. Kennedy grant?” / Scientist: “Exactly.” Kelly proving unexpectedly fluent in the economics of research funding.
• Al: “Cigarettes? Ford Pinto? That condom I used on our wedding night? Read my lips, Peg. There are no side effects.” Dismissing the question of whether an untested formula might have consequences.
• Al: “You know, Peg, I have a sudden urge to take you upstairs and have sex with you… WHO SAID THAT?!” The side effects arriving on schedule.

Notes

• Kelly’s agent commission has risen since season nine’s “The Undergraduate,” where she said she paid Bud fifty-five percent before he demanded eighty to get her out of a slow dance with Robbie. Here she puts the figure at seventy-five.
• The Fox viewing-positions gag from season nine’s “No Pot to Pease In” turns up again in this episode.
• An instrumental version of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” plays over the montage of Bud’s transformations.
• Bud’s “I’ll take ‘Virginity’ for 100, Alex!” is a Jeopardy! reference, Alex Trebek being the host at the time.
• Goof: Bud describes Madame Curie as a French chemist and Kelly later plays her with a French accent. Curie was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Poland and moved to Paris in her mid-twenties, becoming a French citizen after marrying Pierre Curie.
• Kim Weiskopf, a writer and producer on the series, provides the uncredited voice of Lucky.