Season 7 Episode 8: Kelly Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Kelly Bundy gets a job, and the person who takes it worst is her mother. Peg’s objection is a matter of family doctrine: Wanker women do not work, they have never worked, and raising a daughter to coast on her looks was a deliberate parenting strategy that Kelly has now betrayed. The job is waitressing at a diner run by Wayne, a man with no filter and a mouse problem, and the first half of the episode is Kelly being catastrophically bad at it. She cannot write an order down legibly. She tells a paying customer to drop dead. Then, slowly, she gets good at it, and the episode treats that as a genuine achievement rather than a joke at her expense. The sequence that gets quoted is the arrival of a high school field trip. A teacher has brought her students in as the final stop of a program called Scared Smart, designed to demonstrate that being popular in high school does not lead anywhere, and the exhibit is Kelly. The teacher’s introduction is vicious and personal, and the students flee for the library. Kelly’s comeback about the woman’s new husband is one of her best. Back at the house the family has been living off the food Kelly brings home, which is why Al reacts to her talk of quitting with genuine terror. It is one of the best Kelly episodes the series made, and Amanda Bearse directs it with a lot of sympathy for a character the show usually treated as a punchline. The diner is also where Kelly would end up again in spirit years later, since this is the job that stuck longest of any she tried.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: November 8, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 8
• Overall episode number: 139
• Written by: Gabrielle Topping
• Directed by: Amanda Bearse
• Taped: October 23, 1992
• Production note: Amanda Bearse directed, so Marcy does not appear.
• Production note: The diner set was previously used on Who’s the Boss? for the season 8 episode “Misery,” where it was the Wayside Cafe. Both shows had filmed at the ABC Television Center.
• Title note: A play on the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the basis for the sitcom Alice.

Guest Cast

• Brian Doyle-Murray as Wayne
• Charlotte Booker as Miss Parker
• Lisa Robin Kelly as Carol
• Aubree Mazzola as Sandy
• Michael Faustino as the kid
• Bert L. Cook as a customer
• Jasper Cole as Max (uncredited)

Scared Smart

Brian Doyle-Murray is the reason the diner scenes work. Wayne insults Kelly comprehensively and then asks her out in the same breath, without any sense that the two things might be in tension, and his explanation of what the restaurant does with the mice it catches is the single most repellent joke in the season. He delivers all of it as mild shop talk.

The Scared Smart scene is the episode’s real subject. The teacher’s speech is not really about Kelly, it is about the teacher, and the episode makes that clear: she lost a boyfriend and a husband to Kelly in high school and has been waiting years for this. One student in the group, Carol, has already told Kelly she was her idol. Lisa Robin Kelly plays her, and she came back in season 11 as Kelly’s acting and boxing rival Heather Talrico before spending six seasons as Laurie Forman on That ’70s Show.

Michael Faustino, David Faustino’s younger brother, has a non-speaking appearance as the customer at the counter while Wayne tries to decipher Kelly’s handwriting.

The soundtrack choice says what the episode is doing. Kelly’s first day and the closing scene are both scored to “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves,” which for this show is nearly an endorsement.

Famous Quotes

• Wayne, conducting a performance review: “You’re the stupidest girl I’ve had working here. And that says a lot… In fact, you are one whopping moron. So, uh… wanna go out with me later?”
• Kelly, declining: “I would rather stick my nose in the deep fryer… That is if there’s enough room for it with the mouse in there.”
• Miss Parker, introducing the exhibit to her students: “She learned nothing in 5 years of high school, and you worshipped her for it! You used to know her as ‘Kelly Bundy’, but now she answers to the name she’ll carry for the rest of her life… HEY, WAITRESS!”
• Miss Parker, with a parting tip: “Stay away from my new husband! He’s 18 and still peaking!” Kelly: “Well, he’d have to peak. He wouldn’t want to look at it dead on!”
• Kelly: “Daddy, I’m thinking of quitting my job.” Al, mouth full: “PUMPKIN, NO!”

Notes

• Peg recites the opening of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” after announcing she no longer has a daughter.
• Peg’s claim that Wanker women have never worked ignores her own stints at Muldin’s clock department and Burger Trek, and Kelly’s as the Verminator, the Weenie Tot spokesmodel and a waitress at Bill’s Hilltop Drive-In.
• Jefferson’s arrival at the diner with a camera prompts Wayne to ask whether he took his photograph on a cruise, which Ted McGinley denies. He had in fact played a cruise ship photographer on The Love Boat. Jefferson then calls Al both Captain and Fonzie.
• Bert L. Cook, from the show’s production staff, is the customer who asks where his food is and gets told to drop dead.
• Seven tells Bud he is six years old, which is odd given that the family had to invent a birthday for him five episodes earlier.
• A goof: the drinks on the kitchen table refill and empty themselves repeatedly through the opening scene.