Season 9 Episode 3: Kelly Breaks Out

Kelly lands a job as the spokeswoman for a beer called Ice Hole, which is the biggest break of her career so far, and then gets her first pimple. Her reaction is total, and her solution is a homemade skin preparation sent up from Wanker County, which clears the spot and also removes all of her hair and grows her a goatee. She loses the commercial. The director takes one look at her and cancels the shoot, which creates an unlikely alliance, because Marcy and her feminist group have spent the episode protesting that same commercial on the grounds that it is sexist, and now find themselves objecting to its cancellation on different grounds entirely. Marcy’s confrontation with Al about what a woman’s body has to do with selling beer produces the longest and most committed piece of nonsense Al constructs all season, a two-part argument that begins with the three marriages he believes beer is responsible for and ends with a taxonomy of which products attractive and unattractive women are respectively used to sell. Running underneath it, Al and Jefferson have ordered a set of Avengers tapes from a home shopping channel for the sole purpose of looking at Emma Peel, and the tapes have not arrived. It is a busy episode with three plots running at once, and the Emma Peel material is the one that has aged into something close to charming. The alliance of convenience between Marcy’s protest and the cancelled commercial is the sort of structural joke the writers were still finding new angles on this late in the run.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: September 18, 1994
• Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 3
• Overall episode number: 186
• Written by: Larry Jacobson
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Production note: Katey Sagal appears only briefly, still being written around after the birth of her daughter.
• Production note: Kelly establishes that this is the first time in her life she has had acne.
• Title note: A double meaning on Kelly’s skin and on her attempt to break into acting.

Guest Cast

• Dot-Marie Jones as Lola (credited as Dot Jones)
• Michael Francis Clarke as the stage manager
• Cleto Augusto as the director
• Dennis Phun as the Chinese actor
• Don Brunner as Cameraman #1

Still Without Peel

Al’s defence of using attractive women to sell beer is one of the great Al Bundy constructions, because it is delivered as formal argument with numbered points and arrives at a conclusion that is internally consistent and completely absurd. The taxonomy at the end, assigning different product categories to attractive and unattractive women, builds to a final line about what each type makes men do with beer that is the best-timed joke in the episode.

The detail that makes the scene is Jefferson raising his hand to be included in the list of marriages beer is responsible for, and Marcy turning around to look at him.

The Avengers subplot is Al and Jefferson at their most companionable, and Al’s phone call to the distributor is the standout. He demands to know who regulates the company, is told nobody does, asks for their telephone number, writes it down, and reads it back. Bud’s attempt to point out that the woman on the tapes is now considerably older than she was in 1966 gets an answer about the advantages of videotape that is bleak even for Al.

Dot-Marie Jones appears here as Lola, long before Glee. She was a genuine world champion arm wrestler before turning to acting.

Peg contributes a line about Cousin Zemo delivering illegal fireworks to Peoria, which is the sort of Wanker County detail the series dropped in without explanation.

Famous Quotes

• Kelly, asking her brother for money: “I need it to help me get a beer commercial.” Bud: “Budweiser?” Kelly: “No, Ice Hole.” Bud: “I’m just asking, slut.”
• Bud, on the Avengers tapes: “Has it occurred to either of you rutabagas that the woman may be pushing 200 by now? Pounds and years.” Al: “That’s why you look at them on tape. If I only had to look at your mother on tape, I’d still be having sex with her.”
• Al, on the telephone: “It’s been over two weeks and I’m still without Peel. Now, I’m going to whoever regulates you people. Who is that anyway?” Then, writing: “‘Absolutely no one.’ What is their number? ‘1-800-Bite-Me.’ Gotcha.”
• Marcy: “Can you tell me what a woman’s body has to do with selling beer?” Al: “Number one, if it wasn’t for beer, there would be at least three people who probably wouldn’t be married: Me… Jefferson… and probably, uh… Lisa Marie Presley.”
• Al, concluding: “Pretty women sell good products, ugly women sell… tennis rackets. Pretty women: cars; ugly women: minivans. Pretty women make us buy beer. Ugly women make us DRINK BEER!”

Notes

• Al opens the episode listing minor characters from sixties and seventies television, and later mistakes a Rolling Stones video for a Barnaby Jones reunion, having confused Keith Richards with Buddy Ebsen.
• Michael Francis Clarke, the stage manager here, had appeared in season 4’s “At the Zoo” as a bartender.
• Goofs: the skin cap used for Kelly’s bald head is visible near her eyebrows, and the telephone changes orientation and is back in use within seconds of Al slamming it down.