Season 6 Episode 1: She’s Having My Baby (1)

September 8, 1991

Published 09/08/91

The season 6 premiere, the most-watched episode in the history of the series, and the start of a storyline the show would eventually take back entirely. It opens with Marcy and Jefferson arriving at the Bundy house to announce that Marcy is pregnant. Al’s response is pure delight, not for them but at them, because as far as he is concerned Jefferson’s life has just ended and he intends to enjoy watching it happen. He is still laughing when Peg tells him that the Bundys are expecting as well. The rest of the episode is Al processing that information, which he does badly. He is forty-something, he sells women’s shoes, and the arithmetic of a fourth mouth on his salary does not work under any conditions. His hair begins falling out at an accelerated rate. Bud and Kelly, who are no happier about acquiring a sibling than their father is about acquiring a child, spend the episode laying guilt on him for having done this to them. Jefferson, meanwhile, is thrilled, compares himself to Michael Jordan, and throws himself into fetching things for his wife. The episode’s centerpiece is a nightmare in which Al meets his new child, a three hundred pound adult played by an uncredited Abraham Benrubi, who at the time was starring on Parker Lewis Can’t Lose over on the same network. Twenty-nine point two million people watched this, and nothing the series did afterward came close. It is also, in hindsight, one of the stranger pieces of television history the series produced, because almost everything it sets up would be formally declared to have never happened.

Episode Facts

Original air date: September 8, 1991
Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 1
Overall episode number: 106
Written by: Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: August 16, 1991
Production note: Watched by 29.2 million viewers, the highest rated episode of the entire run.
Production note: Starting with this episode, Ted McGinley is credited as a series regular, billed after David Faustino.
Title note: A play on the 1988 film She’s Having a Baby, with a nod to the Paul Anka and Odia Coates duet “(You’re) Having My Baby.”