Season 9 Episode 4: Naughty But Niece
September 25, 1994
Bud has a scholarship examination coming up, possibly for Oxford, and he needs somewhere quiet to study. The Bundy living room is not it, because Al is watching a football game, so Bud tries the shoe store instead, and that is where this episode earns its place in the series: it is the first appearance of Griff. Al’s new co-worker promises not to disturb him, explains that he is only there because he has nowhere else to be, and then delivers his entire divorce in instalments, each one interrupting Bud’s reading, each one worse than the last, finishing with a comparison to Michael Jackson’s marital status and an assurance that he is not bitter. He then puts his face in his hands and sobs. Bud leaves. Back at the house the noise is worse, and Bud’s eventual solution is to hand out his entire wallet to get everybody out of the building. And then Marcy’s nineteen-year-old niece Amber arrives from Los Angeles, and Amber is extremely interested in Bud, which means the studying does not happen either. Whether any of it is actually happening is a question the episode leaves slightly open. Griff aside, it is a fairly ordinary episode, but the character he introduces here would carry a great deal of the show’s remaining run. The Amber material is thinner than it should be, and the episode is noticeably more interested in Bud’s inability to find twenty minutes of silence than in anything that happens afterwards. Harold Sylvester’s arrival is the thing that matters here, and the show knew it, giving him the longest uninterrupted run of dialogue any new character got this late.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: September 25, 1994
- Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 4
- Overall episode number: 187
- Written by: David Castro
- Directed by: Gerry Cohen
- Production note: The first appearance of Griff, Al’s co-worker at the shoe store, and the only one of Al’s co-workers to last more than two seasons.
- Production note: Also the first appearance of Marcy’s niece Amber, who returns in three more episodes, and of Kelly’s boyfriend Genghis, who appears in three.
- Title note: A play on “naughty but nice,” with a nod to the arrival of the niece.
Guest Cast
- Juliet Tablak as Amber
- Joseph D. Reitman as Genghis (credited as Joseph Reitman)
- Heather Dubrow as Cherise (credited as Heather Paige Kent)
- Kirsten Holmquist as Breezy
Enter Griff
Griff’s introduction is one of the best character debuts the series managed this late in its run, and it works entirely through structure. He opens by promising silence. He then interrupts four times, and each interruption is a complete small tragedy delivered in a conversational tone, with a reassurance at the end that he is fine. The escalation from the divorce to the property settlement to his legal rights to Michael Jackson is impeccably paced, and the breakdown at the end is the payoff.
Harold Sylvester would stay with the show through to the end, which makes him the most durable of Al’s various shoe store colleagues. Aaron Mitchell had lasted a season. Dexter lasted one episode.
Bud’s method of clearing the house is the episode’s second-best joke, because it works. He pays each family member individually to leave, and Al’s calculation about whether to accept takes exactly as long as the television needs to tell him the game is lost.
Al’s exchange with Bud about Oxford is the sort of two-line gag the series could do in its sleep, and Al’s claim about having sold them for years is technically accurate.
Marcy reveals that Bud last met Amber six years earlier, when she was thirteen, which is the kind of arithmetic the episode would have done better to leave alone.
Famous Quotes
- Bud, trying to get the television off: “Dad, can you stop seniling around and turn this game off long enough for me to study?”
- Griff, promising not to interrupt: “I’m just here ’cause I don’t have any other place to go. I used to have a place to go… but then I got divorced. Now I got two places I don’t go!”
- Griff, continuing: “She got the house, the car, the money. I got the right to remain silent. But that’s fair, I guess.”
- Griff, arriving at his real grievance: “What really ticks me off is that Michael Jackson is married and I’m not. But I’m not bitter. You go on back to your studies.”
- Bud, paying off his sister: “Kelly, go get yourself some concert tickets.” Kelly: “Thank you, Bud. If you weren’t my brother, I…” Bud: “Yeah, I know. You’d be surrendering your body for ice cream and a pony ride.”
Notes
- Al reveals that he once saw Marcy naked and was clinically dead for an hour and a half afterwards.
- The band Kelly is a fan of is called Otitis Media, which is the medical term for a middle ear infection.
- Al’s grasp of the football being played is shaky: he claims that losing to the Rams gets a team thrown out of the league.
