Season 7 Episode 25: Wedding Repercussions

Cousin Jimmy returns to find out who slept with his wife before the wedding, and Bud is the answer. The episode is a sustained exercise in terror: Jimmy is enormous, he is working his way toward the truth, and he has announced that if nobody confesses he will simply go up and down the block beating everyone until someone does. Kelly, who knows, spends the half-hour threatening to tell him.

Al’s contribution is the best thing in it. Asked whether lying is the wrong thing to do, he delivers what the series treats as a formal statement of family doctrine: the Bundy name was built on lying, owing money and beer, and the only thing separating them from the Kennedys is the money. It is one of the handful of Al Bundy speeches that works as a thesis statement for the whole show.

The episode also gives Peggy the single clearest account of how she sees her husband, comparing him to an old hound dog that nobody wants and that is not good for anything, but that she has had since he was a puppy. The series rarely let her be that direct, and it is affectionate in a way that none of her other declarations quite manage.

Abraham Benrubi plays Cousin Jimmy, and he had appeared on the series once before, uncredited, as the baby in Al’s fantasy in “She’s Having My Baby”: he was simultaneously starring on FOX’s Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. Bud, defending his record, points out he is not the only Peeping Tom in the family. This is the last episode with Kevin Curran as the voice of Buck; he left the writing staff after the following episode and Kim Weiskopf took over.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: May 16, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 25
• Written by: Arthur Silver
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen

Guest Cast

• Abraham Benrubi as Cousin Jimmy
• Barbara Ann Moore as Dee Anna