Season 11 Episode 16: Breaking Up is Easy to Do (3)

March 3, 1997

Published 03/03/97

The conclusion gives Bruce a chance to lose on his own merits, and he takes it. Having installed himself in Peggy’s life, he starts proposing changes, to the house, to the children, to the way things are done, and the family’s tolerance evaporates. It is a smart way to resolve the story: nobody has to argue that Al is better, only that Bruce is worse, and the Bundys close ranks around a standard of living they have no intention of raising.

Al’s campaign to get back in is conducted through pretexts. He turns up claiming to be visiting Lucky rather than his wife, and asks Jefferson whether the dog was supposed to be bigger, Jefferson’s correction, that it was Buck who was bigger, is one of the very few times the series mentioned the dog after his death in “Requiem for a Dead Briard.” The scene preceding it is the best writing in the three-parter: Al, sporting a black eye from a jealous boyfriend, delivering a confident account of his success with women and then immediately retracting every detail of it to Griff.

The episode’s centrepiece is a long montage of Peggy remembering her marriage, assembled from fourteen clips spanning seasons two through eleven, Al pushing the Dodge into the garage, Al attempting to hang himself with the telephone cord, Peggy brushing his teeth and armpits with the same toothbrush, the game show where she electrocuted him. It is the closest thing the series made to a highlight reel of the marriage, and the fact that she finds all of it fond is the joke and the answer at once.