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

Kelly Breaks Out

👉 Watch on Amazon Prime