Season 9 Episode 12: I Want My Psycho Dad (1)

Psycho Dad has been cancelled, and the episode that was supposed to air has been replaced by a celebrity interview special. For Al this is not a scheduling change, it is a civil rights matter, and NO MA’AM convenes in the Bundy living room to decide what to do about it. The brainstorming scene is the best thing in the episode: Griff proposes letters, Al rules that real men do not write letters, Griff clarifies which publication he had in mind, and Bob Rooney’s two follow-up questions about the contents of that magazine establish exactly how much reading anyone in the room has done. Al then instructs the group to apply the power of their giant manly brains, and the show holds on three men thinking, cuts away, and comes back to find them still at it. Bud’s suggestion about jumper cables and Peg’s response is the punchline. The plan they eventually arrive at is a protest outside the television station, which they hold in forty below with twenty mile an hour winds and then abandon in order to get warm, leaving behind the only evidence the news crew is able to find. With Chicago unmoved, the group decides to take the campaign to Washington.

What gives the two-parter its edge is that the show had been through this fight itself. Michael G. Moye had clashed with FOX over the script while it was still in draft form during the eighth season, accusing the network of trying to censor it, and the finished episodes arrived a year later with that argument baked into them. Al protesting a cancellation on the steps of a television station is not an abstract premise for the people who made it, which is why the brainstorming scene plays with more conviction than the plot strictly requires.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: December 11, 1994
• Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 12
• Overall episode number: 195
• Written by: Barry Gold
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Production note: This two-parter had a difficult road to air. In 1993, while it was still an early draft slated for season 8, co-creator Michael G. Moye publicly accused FOX of trying to censor it, which he attributed to the network wanting to appease Congress during Attorney General Janet Reno’s campaign against television violence.
• Title note: A play on MTV’s “I Want My MTV” slogan.

Guest Cast

• Andrew Prine as Psycho Dad
• Tom McCleister as Ike
• Teresa Parente as Miranda Veracruz de la Hoya Cardinal
• Bill Lee Brown as the cameraman

I Want My Psycho Dad (1)

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