Peggy's relatives are coming! You know when Bud and Kelly had breakfast that something was up. Zemus and Ida Mae are Peggy's strange, bizarre relatives. Zemus is played the annoying Bobcath Goldwait and his wife, Ida Mae, is played by Oscar nominee Linda Blair. Anyway, Zemus and Ida Mae only made one appearance and it was to drop off their seventh child named Seven, a precocious trouble-maker played adorable Shane Sweet. This episode was brought upon by the face that other sitcoms added adorable younger sidekicks but Seven didn't go very well or last as long. I thought he was funny and natural in the role. Peggy becomes the obsessed mother to Seven that she wasn't to Bud or Kelly. Anyway, this season was after Marcy and Peggy were pregnant in a previous season. It would have been better for Seven to get Jefferson and Marcy as parents.
4 Reviews
Now whose great idea was that?
BA_Harrison13 December 2022
My summary for the final episode of season six was 'Roll on season seven - it has to be better than this.'. How wrong could I be?
While it was great to see Bobcat Goldthwait and Linda Blair guest starring as Peggy's relatives Zeemus and Ida Mae, they are given very little to do other than to facilitate the arrival of another regular character to the show: their 'cute' son Seven, who the Bundys adopt after his parents abandon him.
Adding an annoying little moppet to the show (Shane Sweet is not a great child actor) is going to make it very hard for me to continue through all of the seasons as I had originally planned. If they don't up the quality of the writing to compensate, I can see myself calling it a day fairly soon...
While it was great to see Bobcat Goldthwait and Linda Blair guest starring as Peggy's relatives Zeemus and Ida Mae, they are given very little to do other than to facilitate the arrival of another regular character to the show: their 'cute' son Seven, who the Bundys adopt after his parents abandon him.
Adding an annoying little moppet to the show (Shane Sweet is not a great child actor) is going to make it very hard for me to continue through all of the seasons as I had originally planned. If they don't up the quality of the writing to compensate, I can see myself calling it a day fairly soon...
Ouch
Nick Zbu9 April 2022
Warning: Spoilers
You can't see how this episode went wrong until you remember Season Six and how the pregnancy subplot that dominated the first half of that season had to be retconned in the middle of the season (with a very good episode) due to personal tragedy. The thrust of making Season 6 revolve around pregnancy was an idea by the producers to make Al's life even more difficult by having another mouth to feed as his other two kids were leaving high school and going to fend for themselves.
On one hand, the producers did identify their problem correctly: having the kids leave high school was a very bad idea for the show as Al was the sort of parent to kick them out once they were of age and then the show was over. No more children, no more show. And this indeed become a very big issue for the show going onward from this point as the show did start the trend of trying to introduce subtle changes to promote more story ideas for their characters only to drop them or drop them and reset back to a status quo which meant the characters basically stopped growing outright. But why they stuck with the idea of adding a small child to the cast really was their downfall. It burned them once, why did they think they should try it again?
The answer? They shouldn't have. They probably should have done anything else besides this. The show, at its heart, is one of teenagers and adults on the teenager mindset: people stuck in perpetual adolescence that they can never recover from. You really can't stick a child in this mix and make it work. And as the rest of the season shows, you can't.
Kudos to the creative staff to trying to make something work to keep up the energy from Seasons 2 to 5. But in all honesty, maybe the solution was to keep the kids in school somehow instead of playing the Cousin Oliver card. Sadly, this lesson would not be learned, and one of the bigger flaws of the show going forward was trying to find more ways to introduce a high school/college sort of element to the proceedings and dropping those without a thought over and over again.
On one hand, the producers did identify their problem correctly: having the kids leave high school was a very bad idea for the show as Al was the sort of parent to kick them out once they were of age and then the show was over. No more children, no more show. And this indeed become a very big issue for the show going onward from this point as the show did start the trend of trying to introduce subtle changes to promote more story ideas for their characters only to drop them or drop them and reset back to a status quo which meant the characters basically stopped growing outright. But why they stuck with the idea of adding a small child to the cast really was their downfall. It burned them once, why did they think they should try it again?
The answer? They shouldn't have. They probably should have done anything else besides this. The show, at its heart, is one of teenagers and adults on the teenager mindset: people stuck in perpetual adolescence that they can never recover from. You really can't stick a child in this mix and make it work. And as the rest of the season shows, you can't.
Kudos to the creative staff to trying to make something work to keep up the energy from Seasons 2 to 5. But in all honesty, maybe the solution was to keep the kids in school somehow instead of playing the Cousin Oliver card. Sadly, this lesson would not be learned, and one of the bigger flaws of the show going forward was trying to find more ways to introduce a high school/college sort of element to the proceedings and dropping those without a thought over and over again.
Al Must Be Dreaming, Al Must Be Dreaming, Dream
IcyTones21 June 2020
This is an unsatisfactory episode with terrible acting.
You can always tell when a director/producer/writer has gone down the slippery slope of an unsuccessful storyline - because one or more of the characters had a dream, wake up from a dream or they're not really dead but in a coma or disappeared somewhere to sleep.
In this instance Al is Dreaming. Peg is not really pregnant, neither is Marcy. Then comes 'The Magnificent Seven' - child actor 'Shane Sweet' - who's not a very good child actor & is very stiff & wooden, just like the child actor Iain Armitage who plays 'Young Sheldon'.
In this instance Al is Dreaming. Peg is not really pregnant, neither is Marcy. Then comes 'The Magnificent Seven' - child actor 'Shane Sweet' - who's not a very good child actor & is very stiff & wooden, just like the child actor Iain Armitage who plays 'Young Sheldon'.
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