Season 10 Episode 6: The Weaker Sex

October 22, 1995

Published 10/22/95

Peggy takes a women’s self-defense class, turns out to be good at it, and gets moved up to the advanced group. For Al this is not a hobby his wife has picked up, it is an attack on the natural order, and the half-hour is built around a man who cannot tolerate the idea that the person on the couch might be able to handle herself better than he can. He works through his position out loud, in a line at a cinema, using the animal kingdom as supporting evidence, and the episode arranges for reality to contradict him in the most public way available.

Kelly supplies the plan. If Peg can be lured out on the night of her class, she will fall behind and drop it, so Al books a romantic evening: the director’s cut of The Bridges of Madison County, which has drawn a queue of delighted women and a row of men in visible distress. The scene is one of the season’s best bits of staging, panning down the line past husbands drinking from flasks and one Englishman who flings himself into traffic rather than watch Meryl Streep in a bathtub, before settling on Al defacing a poster with a marker.

Then a man reaches for Al’s wallet, and Peg puts him on the floor with one punch while a news crew films it. The rescue is the worst possible outcome for Al, not because he was robbed, but because his wife saved him on camera, and the local reporter treats it as an act of heroism. Bud’s subplot runs him into a biker bar and a woman who takes him into the bathroom, which goes about as well for him as everything else does.

Episode Facts

Original air date: Sunday, October 22, 1995 on FOX
Season 10, Episode 6
Overall episode 217 of the series
Production code 10.06
Written by Dvora Inwood
Directed by Amanda Bearse
The title nods to the 1948 film The Weaker Sex and to the old line about women being the weaker sex