Season 2 Episode 9: Alley of the Dolls

November 8, 1987

Published 11/08/87

Peggy has an arch rival from high school, Mimi, and the two of them settle it the only way available: a family bowling match. Steve agrees to bowl as a Bundy, which on paper makes victory a formality: he is the only adult in either household with demonstrable competence at anything. The problem is Bud, who was given money for bowling lessons and has disposed of it, which leaves the team short one trained player and the episode with its actual plot.

The bowling alley became one of the series’ most-used locations and this is where the show works out how to use it. The family competes as a unit, badly, with Al as the only genuine talent and everyone else a liability, and the stakes are entirely about status rather than money. Mimi exists to be beaten; the episode’s interest is in whether the Bundys can hold together long enough to do it.

This is also the first outing for the “Whoa, Bundy!” cheer, which the family performed for the next nine years, and the first time Kelly addresses her brother as Budrick, a name she kept returning to, and which eventually got its own puppet in season eleven. Deborah Harmon, who plays Mimi, came back to the series nine years later as a different rival of Peggy’s, June Morgan, in season ten’s finale. Marcy mentions attending her own reunion with a good job and a husband, which, given she and Steve married in February 1987, places her at around twenty-eight.