Episode Title: “Kelly Knows Something”

Production Code: 0823

Reviewed By: Nitzan Gilkis (n_gilkis@yahoo.com)

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

The problem with “Kelly Knows Something” is that its story lacks enough substance to fill an entire episode on its own. As a result, the episode is abundant with time-wasting devices, including three long clips and two playings of the Psycho Dad theme song. This makes it rather boring to watch, and many of the scenes just seems to drag on endlessly. An additional subplot could certainly have benefitted this episode.

Al: …And you know whose paycheck that’s gonna come out of.

Peg: Kelly’s?

Al: Damn right, if I can find out where she hides her purse.

“Dress a Barbie, Max. Let a real man handle this”

The clips are the episode’s main weakness. Take for example the one that deals with Kelly’s tutoring. It lasts a full two minutes but not a second of it is even remotely funny. Not the lines that go in and out of Kelly’s ears, not the Marcy-matches-an-egg joke, not the books Kelly reads. Utterly dispensable in my opinion. The clip of Al’s appearance on the ‘Touchdown Trivia’ simulation manages to produce a slightly amusing moment, when Al offers his shaving machine to Max, but is generally just as otiose. The clip of Kelly’s appearance on ‘Touchdown Trivia’ doesn’t even try to be funny, but it’s not suspenseful, either, so I don’t see why they couldn’t just replace it with the traditional frame-flip and skip right to the three-way tie at ninety yards.

Al: Buy a second-hand TV, you said. For ten bucks you can’t go wrong, you said. And now look: twenty years later, the damn thing’s broken.

Kelly gains wisdom

Neither of the two ‘Touchdown Trivia’ scenes hold enough interest to justify their prolonged duration. The jokes are too few and too far apart, and there are way too many sports-trivia questions here for my taste (nearly a dozen!). I’m sure the writers could have omitted some of them without sacrificing the plot. One of the things that made previous episodes which had Bundys appearing on game shows (“You Can’t Miss”, “How Do I Love Thee”) so successful was that there was a certain amount of parody involved, but here the script is so dead-serious that at times you almost forget you’re not really watching a sports-trivia show. Hello, people, this is supposed to be a sitCOM!

“Daddy, I’m full”

I don’t think there is a single viewer who actually expected Kelly to win the $10,000 prize, but the way it happens is quite fun to watch nonetheless. You can see it coming from the moment Al says “Travis put a thought into Kelly's head. That means she lost a fact”, and it becomes even more obvious when Peg asks “aren't you afraid they're gonna ask her the one fact she lost?”, so by the time Travis reads the question out loud the whole audience knows what’s going to happen and responds with a sympathetic “ohhhhhhh”. I guess the writers could have done it in a more subtle way, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

Al: So this God person, what do you think she looks like?

A moment of disappointment for Al

Apart from the aforementioned ending there isn’t much I can say in favor of this episode. There’s some funny dialog in the first scene, especially Al’s fat-woman story, and later on a funny joke from Bud about Kelly’s brainsize. Also, this episode marks the second out of four appearances by Mary-Pat Green (“I need shoes!”), whose recurring macho-woman character I’ve always found very funny. Oh, and the “now with more kinky sex and nudity and less violence, for a cleaner and saner America” line after the Psycho Dad theme song had me in stitches. But that’s about it. Not surprising, given the fact that the amount of dialog here is less than half of that of the average episode…

So to sum things up, this is no doubt one of the weakest late-MWC episodes. If you’ve never watched it, don’t bother.