Season 11 Episode 14: Breaking Up is Easy to Do (1)

February 24, 1997

Published 02/24/97

The first of three parts, and the series’ last big story. It starts with a game night: the Bundys, the D’Arcys, and Griff with a date named Nancy, playing a board game called Passion that works on the principle of The Newlywed Game: ask the couples how well they know each other. Al does not know Peggy’s favourite film, her birthday or the colour of her eyes. The evening also produces a tidy inventory of everyone’s inner lives, including Marcy’s childhood ambition to be a princess, Nancy’s to be Mrs. J.J. Walker, and Peggy’s to be a ballerina.

Peggy’s response is to propose a marriage counsellor, and Al’s refusal is one of his great set speeches: a list of the things he does not do, delivered as a statement of identity, ending with the claim that no threat or torture could change his mind. Peggy walks to the telephone and dials her mother. He is on his knees before she finishes the sentence. The session itself goes so badly that the two of them leave the counsellor’s office separately, which is where the three-parter actually begins.

Kelly’s subplot has her boxing a rival named Heather for a part in a fight picture, with Bud holding the mitts and a cover of “Eye of the Tiger” over the training montage. There is a piece of production history behind the main story worth knowing: taping was delayed because an earlier draft was judged too serious to use. In that version Al instigated the split, after Peggy admitted she had faked a pregnancy to get him to marry her.

Episode Facts

Original air date: Monday, February 24, 1997 on FOX
Season 11, Episode 14, part one of three
Overall episode 252 of the series
Taped January 17, 1997; production code 11.16
Written by Eric Abrams and Matthew Berry
Directed by Mark K. Samuels
The title plays on Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”
Parts one and two were broadcast together as a single hour; this episode has no epilogue