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

November 8, 1992

Published 11/08/92

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.