Season 9 Episode 9: No Pot to Pease In

November 6, 1994

Published 11/06/94

Kelly auditions for a part on a FOX sitcom, and in the course of the meeting she starts telling the producer about her family. He stops caring about the script. What the Bundys are watching a few weeks later is a series called Pease in a Pod, in which a thinly disguised version of their own household is broadcast weekly to the nation, and the episode’s best running device is the clip montage: as Kelly describes each family member, the show cuts to actual footage from its own past, scored to the instrumental break of “Love and Marriage.” Al’s reel includes the burning foot, the inflatable pool and the new toilet. Peg’s includes the salad and the candy bar. Marcy’s includes the chicken impression and the bank. It is eight years of the series used as evidence against itself. Then the reactions start. Jefferson is furious about how he has been depicted and demands to know whether he is meant to be some mindless, gold-digging gigolo, and the pause before anybody answers him is the funniest moment in the episode. Kelly’s defence of the one thing she lied about, her own education, is undercut within seconds by what her television counterpart does next. The show is eventually cancelled because one woman in Michigan complained.

What makes the half-hour work is that the show is not satirising some other series, it is satirising itself. Pease in a Pod is Married… with Children with the names changed and the edges filed off, and the Bundys watch it from the couch in the same postures the audience is watching them in. The clip package Kelly’s audition triggers is drawn from across the previous eight seasons, which turns the premise into a genuine retrospective smuggled inside a joke about network development.

Episode Facts

Original air date: November 6, 1994
Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 9
Overall episode number: 192
Written by: John Glenn Houston
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Production note: The reason given for Pease in a Pod’s cancellation, that one woman in Michigan did not like it, is a direct reference to Terry Rakolta, whose 1989 campaign against this series cost it advertisers.
Production note: The FOX executive is named Ronald N. Michaels, after series creators Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye.
Production note: The closing credits replace the usual couch freeze frame with a photograph of the real cast and the fictional Pease cast together in the Bundy living room.
Title note: A play on “no pot to piss in.”