Season 5 Episode 10: One Down, Two to Go

November 25, 1990

Published 11/25/90

Kelly is eighteen and intends to use it. She comes through the front door with a boyfriend called Jake, announces her new legal status to her father, and heads for the stairs. Jake tells Al to hold his calls.

What follows is the definitive version of a joke the show told for eleven years. Al puts Jake in a chokehold, walks him back down the staircase, offers to introduce him to the rest of the house, and throws him out of the front door. He then estimates the distance, compares it to his personal record of twenty feet, and goes again. Bud assists by supplying the name of the brother Jake has not mentioned yet, which is how the audience learns that Kelly has worked through the family.

Underneath the farce the episode is doing something real: Kelly leaves. She gets an apartment, Al visits, and the series has to work out what it is without one of the children in the house. The title gives away how the family frames her departure.

Two production notes. The episode first aired on Christina Applegate’s nineteenth birthday. And the two men in the lift who comment on Al’s smell as he goes up to Kelly’s apartment are Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye, who created the series. Watched in sequence this is a bigger episode than it looks. Kelly moving out is the first real structural change to the household since the pilot, and the show handles it almost entirely through Al throwing a teenager out of a door. The emotional content is in what he does rather than anything he says, which is how the series nearly always handled him.