Season 4 Episode 19: Peggy Turns 300

March 25, 1990

Published 03/25/90

Puggy Weaver is leaving the neighborhood, which means this is Al’s final opportunity to take his alley record. He treats the evening with appropriate ceremony, assigning Bud and Kelly the job of filming it on the grounds that too many great Bundy moments have been lost for want of a camera. Peg notes that they did have a camera on their honeymoon, and that he kept beating the flash.

Then Peg starts bowling. Strike after strike, on her own husband’s night, heading for a perfect game while he watches his record attempt evaporate. Al’s attempts to break her concentration fail, Marcy punishes him for trying by kissing him on the mouth, and by the closing minutes a real sports journalist has turned up to interview the woman about it.

The scene that matters is the one on the bench. Al gathers both children, asks them whether they understand what they are witnessing, and Bud guesses a perfect game. Al corrects him: what they are witnessing is the Bundy Curse, the thing that keeps the family from ever being happy, and there is no point fighting it, because it is what separates them from ordinary losers. It is the first time the show gives the family a cosmology, and the Curse got invoked for the next seven seasons as the explanation for everything that went wrong. It is also one of the better showcases for how the show used Peg. She is not trying to humiliate her husband here. She simply turns out to be good at something, in public, on a night he had reserved for himself, and that is enough. The episode never gives her a moment of gloating, which makes it land harder than if it had.