Season 9 Episode 26: The Undergraduate

May 21, 1995

Published 05/21/95

The season 9 finale. Kelly has acquired a secret admirer who has been sending expensive gifts to the house, and when she finally meets him he turns out to be Robby Bennett, a spoiled and extremely wealthy twelve-year-old. Kelly turns him down on the obvious grounds, and Robby does not accept it, citing a family motto about getting what the Bennetts want. Kelly’s counter-motto is the best line in the episode. Robby’s leverage is a jeans commercial Kelly needs, and he uses it to require her attendance at his junior prom, which is how an adult woman ends up at a middle school dance being slow-danced by a child. Bud turns up too, having crashed the event disguised as the DJ, purely in order to enjoy his sister’s situation at close range, and he photographs the whole thing. He does eventually help, by calling Robby’s father, and the resolution introduces a complication nobody in the family anticipated. The episode is also a quiet turning point behind the camera: after this, co-creator Michael G. Moye stepped down as showrunner, staying on as a consultant through most of season 10 before leaving the industry altogether. The half-hour works as a two-hander between the siblings, and the script leans hard on the leverage each one holds over the other: Robby owns the embarrassing photographs, Kelly owns a secret she cannot afford to have read aloud, and Bud sits in the middle collecting a commission from everybody. That arrangement produces the episode’s most quoted exchange, a negotiation over Bud’s percentage that escalates from fifty-five to eighty the moment Kelly admits she is desperate. Around them, Al and Peggy treat the whole situation as a spectator sport, weighing in from the couch without ever offering help, which is more or less the household’s standard operating procedure by this point in the run. As a season finale it is a deliberately small story rather than a cliffhanger, closing out the ninth year on a character beat instead of a stunt, and it carries the quiet distinction of being the last episode produced while co-creator Michael G. Moye was running the show.

Episode Facts

Original air date: May 21, 1995
Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 26
Overall episode number: 211
Written by: Fran E. Kaufer
Directed by: Amanda Bearse
Taped: March 3, 1995, David Faustino’s twenty-first birthday
Production note: Marcy does not appear, as Amanda Bearse directed.
Production note: Meghan Markle appears again as an uncredited extra in the gymnasium, most visibly sitting on the stage near the end. Her father Thomas W. Markle was the show’s director of photography. This is her second appearance on the series after season 7’s “Christmas.”
Production note: The last episode with Michael G. Moye as showrunner. He stayed on as a creative consultant for most of season 10 and wrote one more episode, “Requiem for a Dead Briard,” before leaving the industry.
Title note: A play on The Graduate, crossed with the fact that Robby has not finished middle school.