Season 6 Episode 6: Buck Has a Belly Ache
October 13, 1991
Buck has lost his appetite, and the household’s response is total: Al, Kelly and Bud devote themselves to the dog, and Peggy, pregnant, and accustomed to being the centre of attention, finds herself ignored. She leaves and moves back in with the Wankers, which is the first time the series let her actually walk out rather than threaten to.
The episode is a good demonstration of how the pregnancy storyline altered the household’s balance. Peggy had spent five seasons as the one person in the house nobody could overlook, and the baby arc gave her a status that the dog is able to displace in a single episode. Her departure is played as a genuine grievance rather than a bluff, and the family’s failure to notice she has gone for some time is the joke.
Jefferson’s half of the half-hour has him developing a sympathy pregnancy, which Marcy enjoys considerably more than he does, one of the first signs of how the series intended to use the character now that he had been promoted to the main cast.
This is the last episode to show Peggy pregnant, and the circumstances behind that are worth recording. Katey Sagal was pregnant in life, and shortly after this episode was filmed she suffered a miscarriage. She was absent from the following four episodes while she recovered, and the series resolved the storyline by revealing the entire pregnancy to have been Al’s dream. Joey Lauren Adams appears as Cousin Effie, her second of three roles on the show.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: October 13, 1991
- Season 6, Episode 6, and roughly the 110th episode of the series. Sources differ by one.
- Written by Ellen L. Fogle
- Directed by Gerry Cohen
Guest Cast
- William Sanderson as Cousin Eb
- Joey Lauren Adams as Cousin Effie
- Patrick Cranshaw as Young Kit
- John Gerard as Possum Boy
- Kevin Curran as the voice of Buck, uncredited
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