Season 4 Episode 21: Raingirl

April 29, 1990

Published 04/29/90

Kelly discovers she cannot graduate without completing an internship, which she treats as a catastrophe, and takes a placement at Channel 83. She is put on air as the weather girl almost immediately and then promoted to what she calls the station’s meterlolologist, a word the show lets her keep saying. Al, meanwhile, has spent weeks building up to asking for a raise, and picks this week to do it.

The guessable outcome is the right one. Kelly, with no qualifications and no real idea what she is doing, earns more than her father, and Al has to sit in his own living room and work through what that means about his place in the world.

The scene worth going out of your way for is on the couch, between mother and daughter. Kelly is frightened about graduation, Peg decides the moment has come for a serious talk, and Kelly clings to her and asks to be held. What Peg then advises is entirely about husbands and beer and the virtue of starting young, and Kelly thanks her sincerely for her wisdom. Peg’s explanation for where the wisdom came from is the best line in the episode: you cannot sit on a sofa twenty hours a day and not learn something. The two of them hug. It is a genuinely tender scene built out of completely terrible advice. Taken with the two episodes either side of it, this is the stretch where the show decided what Kelly was going to be. She is not written as stupid here so much as uninterested in anything that does not concern her, and completely unbothered about succeeding at things she never tried to be good at. That combination carried her through seven more seasons.