Season 9 Episode 7: Dial “B” for Virgin

Original air date: October 16, 1994
Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 7
Overall episode number: 190
Written by: Wayne Kline
Directed by: Amanda Bearse
Taped: October 7, 1994
Title note: A play on Hitchcock&#8217;s Dial M for Murder .

October 16, 1994

Published 10/16/94

Bud needs community service credit for college, and the assignment he draws is counselling young women who are trying to remain chaste. He is given a telephone, a handbook and a hotline, and the job requires him to talk callers out of exactly the thing he has spent nine seasons failing to achieve. Kelly works out what he is doing almost immediately and spends the episode calling the line in character, which gives Christina Applegate two of her better prank performances, including one conducted entirely as the family dog. The real test comes when Bud has to make a house call. A caller named Esther is at immediate risk and asks him to come over and stay until her mother gets home, and the scene that follows is the best-constructed thing in the episode: Esther explains at length how difficult chastity is and how preoccupied with sex every woman she knows is, and Bud’s response is to open his official handbook and ask for their names and telephone numbers. The whole sequence is built on Bud being professionally obliged to prevent the only opportunity he has ever been handed. Meanwhile Al and Peg are at a video store trying to agree on one film, which goes about as well as the movie negotiation in season 7 did.

The structure is the joke: the show takes the character least equipped for a job and hands him that exact job, then makes him do it on the phone where he cannot be seen reacting. Kelly’s prank calls supply the running gag, and the house call to Esther supplies the test, putting Bud alone on a couch with someone who keeps telling him how hard chastity is to maintain. Al and Peg’s trip to the video store runs underneath it, a separate errand that gets its own string of invented titles.