The 10 Best "Kate & Allie" Episodes

Let’s presume you’re familiar with the premise of Kate & Allie (two divorced mothers — best friends since high school — decide to share an apartment in Greenwich Village) and jump right to the part where we dispel a few myths. At the advent of the internet, it felt as if the history of television was being chronicled by people who had watched the shows as they aired, and developed opinions and theories in real time. Now that we’re two decades into the 21st century, it’s come to seem as if all shows that predate Friends are being documented by second-hand sources: viewers who came to them decades after the fact, who get their information and often their assertions from the likes of Wikipedia. You see the same false presumptions and annoying inaccuracies crop up in article after article — articles that have clearly been cribbed from one another — and you’re left thinking, “That wasn’t how it happened.”

Nowadays, it’s difficult to find an article about Kate & Allie that doesn’t insist that the show “jumped the shark“ in its sixth and final season. Even if you accept the fact that the term “jump the shark“ is not merely overused, but more often than not misused — simply to mean “a decline in quality” rather than “to stray far from its premise” — the truth is that neither assertion applies to Kate & Allie. The setting shifts in Season 6 when Allie gets remarried. That’s it. The tone of the show doesn’t markedly change. The plotlines don’t become outrageous, or the characters unrecognizable. (Hell, the chief writers for Season 6 had been on staff for three years by that point, and penned some of the series’ very best episodes.) But in order to support a false theory, you’ll also see these same articles discuss the “huge ratings drop“ that occurred in Season 6, oblivious to the fact that that never happened. The ratings drop came a year earlier, after Season 4.

And that audience erosion between Seasons 4 and 5 is crucial to the story of Kate & Allie. When it premiered in March of 1984, the Susan Saint James and Jane Curtin co-starrer was seen as the savior of the network sitcom. Primetime soaps were ruling the ratings, and feature writers were penning eulogies for the sitcom format — and along came Kate & Allie, the only one that season to crack the top 10. "A rare look at friendship between women!" trumpeted TV Guide in its November 24, 1984 cover story. The show made the kind of splash that should have guaranteed it at least a seven-year run (the standard length of an actor’s contract). But viewership dipped after Season 4, and Kate & Allie sputtered to a halt just two seasons later.

And that ratings drop is particularly noteworthy because it was so clearly tied to a tumble in quality. Hit shows tend to have loyal audiences who stick around long after the series have grown tired. But Kate & Allie didn’t. Its audience was discerning, and they saw all too clearly that, in Season 4, it had lost so many of the qualities that had made it singular and inviting. The humor and performances had grown coarser; the laughs too often felt forced. (Ironically, the show had faltered when it could least afford to: just as CBS had moved it from the tentpole 9 PM slot to an 8 PM lead-in slot, where it faced serious competition from an upstart named ALF. And indeed, perhaps it was the earlier timeslot that prompted the writers to broaden the tone in Season 4, to the detriment of the show.) And although the series made a creative comeback in Season 5, the die was cast; Kate & Allie had come to be seen as a show past its prime. It quickly fell out of the top 30, and never again enjoyed the kind of popular success or inspired the sort of watercooler conversation that it had in previous seasons.

To be continued in the paragraphs that follow. Below, my 10 favorite episodes of Kate & Allie, plus (as I am now wont to do) another 10 well worth watching. As with my top 10 Mary Tyler Moore and Designing Women essays, I’ll delve a lot into the various writers, the impulses behind the seasons from which the episodes spring, changes in tone and strategy along the way — and I’m sure to present at least one opinion that will confound or annoy you. At least I hope so.

10. The Triangle Has Four Sides: Actor Greg Salata, as plumber Ted Bartelo, may be the prime example of an overlooked TV trope: the one-off romantic interest who proves so perfect, the writers can never better them. Or in broader terms, someone deliberately designed to serve a short-term function who proves irreplaceable and unimprovable. Introduced near the top of Season 2 as a love interest for Kate, and written off — as planned — a dozen episodes later, Salata alters the trajectory of Kate & Allie by sheer dint of his good looks, his onscreen charisma and his obvious chemistry with Susan Saint James — because the writers can never find anyone else for Kate who remotely measures up. So they’re forced to bring him back season after season, even though their vision of the show has nothing to do with Kate, the free spirit, continually returning to the same man. “The Triangle Has Four Sides” marks Ted’s fourth go-round, in an episode devised as a clever misdirect. It ostensibly revolves around two other men Kate is dating, only one of whom she can bring to a big sporting event. When, at episode’s end, she turns up unexpectedly with Ted, someone she hasn’t dated in two years, the audience gasps and cheers; writer Bob Randall knows his audience, and where their hearts and loyalties lie, and he uses that knowledge to make a surprise payoff hugely satisfying. The script is also a good example of the show’s willingness to cast its lead characters in a negative light. Here Kate is defensive about her right to casually date two men at the same time, but when the two men meet and realize she’s seeing them both — and are absolutely fine with it, because they too believed that they were non-exclusive — she’s disappointed they’re not jealous. In sitcom parlance, she wants them to want her more than she wants them. It’s got a great scene in a Gay ‘90s bar where Kate tries to keep her two dates apart with a series of escalating anecdotes about a sick aunt, and a swell monologue later on where she tries to account for all her lies, which — unfortunately — Saint James muffs a bit. (I was at a taping of Kate & Allie in 1985, and Bill Persky demanded pickup after pickup until the lines were note-perfect, so why he let this monologue go by unpolished is beyond me — unless it was some sort of fifth season malaise.) Also worth a look: another Season 5 episode reintroducing a former boyfriend as a semi-regular, “Return of Bob Barsky," from story editors Anne Flett (now Anne Flett-Giordano) and Chuck Ranberg. Actor Sam Freed first appeared in Season 4’s “Dates of Future Past,” one of the rare Flett-Ranberg efforts that doesn’t come off. (Their least effective scripts were the ones that played like assignments: chart Allie’s first meeting with her ex-husband’s new wife Claire, show Kate so pushed to the brink that she quits her job. And this one, where — with Saint James out of commission because of her pregnancy – Allie has to decide whether to have a fling or not by replaying clips in her head of things Kate has said to her.) They redeem themselves here, not just in their ability to use Bob in a good story, but by reimagining him as a bit of a rogue: one quite willing, like Kate in the episode above, to date multiple partners without worrying about the consequences. Sadly, this intriguing devil-may-care side of Bob disappears over his next few appearances, as he’s pretty much neutered into a perfect suitor for Allie.

9. The Very Loud Family: The series’ second episode, and one of its best-remembered installments, and there are so many reasons I’d like not to include it. The show is still developing, and pretty much all the principals — not just Curtin and Saint James, but Allison Smith and Frederick Koehler as Jennie and Chip, Allie’s kids — are offering one-note versions of the characters they’ll become. (Only Ari Meyers — the glue that holds the episode together, as Kate’s daughter Emma directs a video about her blended family to illustrate “Our Changing World” — doesn’t seem to be pushing or precious.) The premise is improbable: why is Chip, several grades behind Emma and Jennie, assigned the same project? There is an annoying sitcom mentality to the whole thing: all the gags pay off in traditional ways, as do the more sentimental moments – the sort of predictability the show will transcend by the following season. The ultimate message — “although we’re a blended family, we’re also a loving and supportive one” — is cringe-worthy, the kind of thing we don’t need to be told. And finally, the freelancers credited for this one, David Handler and Peter Gethers, also scripted my least favorite episode in the entire run, in which Allie accidentally receives a post-hypnotic suggestion and winds up clucking like a chicken on a live TV broadcast. (As you make your way through life, traversing its long and steep trajectory, you find yourself less and less inclined to reward writers who pitch stories with phrases like “post-hypnotic suggestion” and “clucks like a chicken on a live TV broadcast.”) And all that said, the bloody thing works. It’s one of the few times when Allie is able to instruct Kate in proper parenting skills, and it’s one of the few times Emma’s individuality doesn’t seem limited to her wardrobe. And although the gags pay off fairly predictably, it’s when they pay off that’s the surprise, and that keeps it feeling fresh. It’s a great sitcom episode, even if it’s not a particularly good Kate & Allie episode, and it deservedly won director Bill Persky an Emmy. Also worth a look: Ari Meyer’s last showcase, Season 5’s “The Dilemma With Emma.” In another Flett-Ranberg winner, Emma comes home from the school dance with first boyfriend, Evan. Unfortunately, he’s everything Kate despises: pretentious (his name is Kevin, but he dropped the “k” because “it sounded too suburban”), rude, opinionated and cocky. (“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who wear Armani suits and those who make Armani suits. I intend to wear them.”) The episode isn’t about Emma wising up to his flaws — she’s so smitten she’s willing to overlook them; it’s about her giving her mother permission to dislike him: to challenge him and ultimately to tame him — which she does, to the audience's delight. With Meyer’s departure imminent (she’d decided to become a full-time college student), it’s one of the last chances to watch the full ensemble in action.

8. Piano Lesson: It’s a plotline done to death — young girl develops a crush on an older man, who shows an interest in her mother — but what separates Allan Leicht’s script from all the rest is that the mother here isn’t an innocent bystander: wittingly or not, Kate flirts with Emma’s piano teacher. This is part of her makeup: she’s a perpetual teenager, always armed with a provocative pronouncement or a coy comeback. And so Emma’s fury with her mother — the part of the story-line that never works — feels at least partially warranted, because Kate is eternally, aggressively on the move and on the make. (Of course the piano teacher is captivated.) She can’t even properly apologize to her daughter without indulging in the sort of flattery that makes it sound like a hollow gesture. Because Jane Curtin won two Emmys for Kate & Allie, and Susan Saint James none, it’s common to focus on Curtin’s contributions. Her character was edgier, more neurotic and frankly more original. But Saint James’ work doesn’t receive nearly enough praise. She was never afraid to tackle Kate’s less attractive traits: she always let us see that underneath that bubbly exterior was someone trying just a bit too hard to stay young, to stay hip, to stay relevant. (They were so well paired: Allie, the one terrified to grow; Kate, the one terrified to grow up.) If Curtin was the one more frequently allowed to soar, Saint James was responsible for keeping the show down to earth: for ensuring that its comic tone never became sitcom-ish. During the funniest scenes, she’d often say a line deliberately straight, defying the laugh, refusing to fall into the expected rhythms. Offhand, I can’t think of a sitcom that better convinced you that you were listening to people talk — and not enact a script — than Kate & Allie, and perhaps Saint James’ background in light drama (including The Name of the Game and McMillan and Wife, which between them had garnered her six Emmy nods and one win) made it natural for her to drive home a point not by hitting the laugh harder, but by backing away from it. When she’d lower her pitch and her volume to argue an idea — without ever suggesting a “serious moment” — she expanded the boundaries of the traditional sitcom. Also worth a look: a guy who’s more interested in Emma than she is in him, in the Season 4 opener “The Trouble With Jason.” Flett and Ranberg’s script does a good job disguising Saint James’s pregnancy, which will ultimately impact (and sadly help undermine) Season 4; it also starts to age the characters and advance the premise by getting the girls out of their bunk beds — and giving Jennie a steady boyfriend. And through a combination of good writing and shrewd casting, the central conceit — a tricky one, in which a new kid at school makes a play for Emma, before deciding it’s Jennie he wants — pays off: Jason seems like the genuine annoyance he’s meant to be when he’s pursuing Emma, but once he’s paired with Jennie late in the episode, you instantly warm to him, because of how well he works — and how good he looks — opposite Allison Smith. It’s the rare episode set in a high-school chemistry class that really is about chemistry.

7. Make Mine Mink: Asked to describe the creative impulse behind Kate & Allie, showrunner Bill Persky once insisted, “You start with something real, and it gets crazy, because people are crazy.” It was an interview conducted two decades after the show went off the air, so let’s just presume his memory was failing him, because that description has nothing to do with Kate & Allie — at least, not at its best. At its best, Kate & Allie eschewed the outrageous and found the magic and the poetry in the commonplace. But this is the rare episode about “things spiraling out of control” that actually works. Here, Kate and Allie are having coffee at a restaurant when, at a nearby table, a man and a women start arguing. It becomes clear that she’s his mistress, and when he reminds her how good he’s been to her, buying her the mink coat she’s wearing, she decides to show him exactly how much that mink means to her, selling it to Kate for a dollar. And Kate finds herself the owner of a mink coat that proceeds to impress her wealthy clients, inflate her self-esteem and nearly cost her her job. It’s the kind of daffy concept that usually pulls the show too far from its premise (e.g., Season 2’s tepid “Lottsa Luck,” in which Kate finds a "monkey's paw"), but this one — scripted by two fine freelancers, Karyl Miller and Korby Siamis (he’d go on to win two Emmys and a Writers Guild Award for Murphy Brown) — stays grounded by focusing on the drudgery of Kate’s job, where she’s forced to cater to upscale and frequently ungrateful clients. Kate’s travel-agent office rarely proved a useful backdrop, and although the show’s decision late in Season 4 to have both women quit their day jobs and start a catering business is handled abominably (across three of the most strident and hackneyed episodes in the show’s history — now there’s an example of people acting crazy, to the detriment of the show), the resulting partnership does serve to generate story in the seasons to come. “Make Mine Mink” is the rare episode to use Kate’s job to good effect, as her pretentious clients, seeing her in a mink, welcome her for the first time into their inner circle; it’s a wicked — and not wholly inaccurate — skewering of the New York City elite. Bonus points for a scene in the pricey restaurant La Belle Étoile in which Kate shows off for one of her clients by conversing with the waiter in French. He compliments her, “Vous parlez bien français,” and she jokes, “Merci. J’ai pensé que c’était allemand.” There are no subtitles. Newly wrapped in mink, Kate is quite content to freeze the audience out, much as her wealthier clients have long been doing to her. Also worth a look: another episode about the rich and infamous, Season 6’s “Wanted: One Husband.” A client in Kate and Allie’s building realizes she has everything she wants except someone as wonderful as Bob; she instructs the ladies to find her “another Bob.” Most of the episode (by freelancer Jim Wells) takes place in Allie’s head, as she imagines the repercussions of accepting the job. Because the situations become slowly more outrageous through the course of two acts, it’s one of the rare “fantasy sequences“ of which the show became so fond that actually works: a daffy daydream that includes murder, mayhem and a tainted jar of mayonnaise that glows in the dark.

6. Country Dog: Season 2 sees all the core characters in transition: Allie selling her Connecticut house and using the proceeds to fund her return to college; Kate enjoying her first serious relationship since breaking up with Max; Emma dealing with her father moving to Los Angeles and the accompanying feelings of abandonment; and Jennie and Chip getting used to shuttling between two homes. The situations are so fluid — and the characters so dynamic — that the best story-lines feel self-generating. Here, Allie is wrestling with the fact that her ex-husband Charles can afford to give their son Chip a more expensive birthday present than she can. You may recognize the bare bones of the plot, but you rarely, if ever, have seen it imbued with so much detail as in Leicht’s script, which finds Chip still adjusting to city living, Charles and Allie playing tug-of-war with their children even as they refine the terms of their custody agreement, and all of the principals overcompensating for the pain that divorce puts a family through. The episode is filled with sweet ironies and smart symmetries; great character jokes (Kate, doubtfully: “Can you wash a quilt in the machine?” Allie, proudly: “I can wash an egg in the machine”); one of the best behaved and well trained dogs ever to grace the small screen; and a singing clown that inspires some of Curtin’s best disbelieving looks. Also worth a look: the follow-up to “Country Dog” later in Season 2, “Dead Cat” (co-scripted by series creator Sherry Coben and by Bob Randall). With Chip missing his dog Tristan, who is now living with Charles and Claire in the country, Kate brings home a cat to take his place. But somewhere between the pet store and the apartment, the cat dies. That’s the first five minutes or so, and the rest is about getting Chip to understand the concept of death, let go of his new friend, and accept a newer one. It could’ve been maudlin and sentimental, but instead, it’s dear. It’s not just about teaching Chip a life lesson; it’s about Kate teaching Allie a lesson in parenting. And it’s gratifyingly frank about the concept of an afterlife: giving equal validity to those who believe in heaven and those who believe things just end. Coben and Randall’s styles couldn’t have been more different, but there’s no clash of wills apparent in the scripting; it unfolds with a lovely flow and a gentle inevitability. As in “Country Dog,” Koehler is particularly touching and blissfully unaffected. There might be nothing sweeter in the entire run than Chip sitting in the basement talking to a dead cat inside a picnic basket ("My father's a doctor, he knows a lot of dead people. You're my first one") — except possibly Allie, after dispatching Chip to his room, sighing to that basket, “Boy, you missed out on a terrific kid.”

5. Thank You, Shirley: Jane Richmond pitched three scripts to Kate & Allie; the other two are quite good, but this one, from Season 3, is great. Kate’s friend Shirley calls from LA to announce that a terrific, eligible man has just moved to New York City, and she’s given him her phone number. But when he shows up at their apartment, he offers to take both Kate and Allie out to dinner. Then he takes them both to the opera — and both ladies are left wondering what the hell is happening. You think it’s going to digress into that old staple “two women fight over one man,“ but as it turns out, it’s not about that at all; neither stabs the other in the back, or behaves secretively, or indulges in any of the furtive actions you’ve come to dread from a generation of sitcom viewing. (Richmond’s script makes the two leads a little self-aware, priding themselves on their constancy, but if you grew up watching Lucy and Viv duke it out over every potential suitor under the sun, you’re quite willing to forgive the leads their “we’ve come a long way, baby” moment.) It’s an episode about how hard it is for women of a certain age to find a decent straight man in Manhattan, and there's a sting in the tail that drives the point home. “Thank You, Shirley” contains two of my favorite character jokes in all of Kate & Allie, one where the two compare notes on the indignities they’ve had to endure just to go out with this man, and Allie exclaims, after returning from a fancy restaurant where she ordered to impress: “I had to eat brains. For all I know, they were still thinking.“ And the best at the end, when the man they believe they’ve been dating turns up at their apartment with his idea of a real date (played by Mary Page Keller, pointedly 15 and 14 years younger than Susan Saint James and Jane Curtin, respectively), and Kate is left to dryly observe, “I have pantyhose older than that person.“ Also worth a look: another set-up that goes south, in Season 5’s “Ted’s Fix Up.” The third of four freelance episodes penned by Bill Persky’s daughter Dana, this one finds Kate and her new friend Angie deciding to set each other up with their own exes: a questionable plan that goes awry when the two couples accidentally find themselves seated a few rows apart at the ballet, and that turns downright uncomfortable when Angie and her ex reconcile during intermission. It’s basically just another excuse to bring back Greg Salata, and it neatly paves the way for his semi-permanent return a few episodes later. (As an aside, I remain convinced that if the writers had married Kate off to Ted at the end of Season 5 — instead of Allie to Bob — the show might have gotten a new lease on life. Marrying off Allie did little for the show; from the start of the series, Allie was primed to get remarried. With Kate wed to Ted, you might’ve seen all the compromises she needed to make; you would’ve enjoyed seeing how she and Ted rubbed each other the wrong way in close quarters. And you might’ve felt the show was still unfolding in a way that represented the status of women in the late ‘80s. With Allie, you mostly saw a happy housewife. Marrying Allie to Bob, a nice guy who wanted nothing more than to please her, didn’t jump the shark, as the young online pundits claim; it just didn’t add anything to the texture of the show.)

4. Author, Author: Writing producer Allan Leicht was only around for Season 2; he penned four episodes, and all of them cracked my top 10. It’s easy for me to enumerate the things I like about his scripts, but difficult for me to analyze why he, of all the regular writers, seemed the best suited to the series. He was a highly regarded talent — an Emmy winner for Ryan’s Hope, and fresh off an Emmy-nominated teleplay for the Daniel J. Travanti and JoBeth Williams made-for-TV movie Adam, about the disappearance of 8-year-old Adam Walsh — and perhaps his varied background allowed him best to walk the fine line between comedy and drama at which the show excelled. Maybe his skill at dramatic dialogue made him reluctant to resort to traditional sitcom rhythms, where pretty much every utterance is a set-up or a punchline. And it could be that his soap training helped him understand that even the hoariest plots can be refreshed if they can be made to seem character- rather than writer-driven. His storylines, however much they’re set in motion by outside forces, ultimately boil down to confrontations between the core characters; they deepen the design. Here, more than a decade after college, Kate and Allie resume mooning over one of their professors, who has penned a book about a golden-haired, blue-eyed anarchist named Anna: a nom de plume, they’re convinced, for one of his former students. But which one? It’s a tour-de-force for Curtin, who gets to showcase all the messy contradictions that made Allie Lowell such a fascinating creation — cynical but suggestible, pragmatic but given to romantic flights of fancy — and it comes at a time when Curtin has fully mastered the art of leaping from overwrought to deadpan and back again, without missing a beat. When Kate first urges Allie to imagine that she in fact might be Anna, Allie refuses to consider it: “Look, it’s fiction. This isn’t real. This is a man’s imagination, and we’re fantasizing our heads off over it.” But when she goes to a bookstore where the professor is doing a signing, and he inscribes her copy “known to me as Anna,” she agrees to meet him that evening, and back home, gets lost in her reveries: “How many times in one’s life is one the inspiration for art? What does it feel like to be the Mona Lisa — no, not the painting: the woman.” And finally, when Kate reveals that he’s signed all of his former students’ books that way, because he’s a sleaze, Allie’s quick to see the light. Oh, she still going to meet him, but “I’m going to do what any other golden-haired, blue-eyed anarchist would do: I’m gonna off the pig.” Curtin’s work here is brilliant even for her, making all these shifts of mood smooth, clear, convincing and completely consistent with a woman who’s most at home carving a chicken (as she does, effortlessly, in one early scene, all while scaling a mountain of dialogue). Also worth a look: another episode that draws on Kate and Allie’s college days, Season 2’s “Diner,” by freelancer Stu Hample. Charles’s desire to sell the house prompts Allie to take a trip back to Connecticut, where a couple of chance encounters give her the clarity she needs. The owner of the diner is a little too ethnically sincere for her own good, and the kids Allie overhears provide a little too convenient a life lesson, but Curtin is marvelous throughout. She truly does convey a woman at a crossroads, and a woman quite unlike any who’s ever headlined a sitcom.

3. Jennie and Jason: Bob Randall was headwriter for the first five seasons of Kate & Allie. It’s arguable that no one did more to shape the series than he did; it’s also undeniable that he was the show’s most uneven regular writer. If an episode description sounded preachy (Kate wonders if she’s liberal enough to date a black man; Allie learns about the plight of the homeless), it was inevitably his. He would borrow the most hackneyed plots from old sitcoms; his Season 2 effort “If She Goes, I Go” is a blatant rip-off of the I Love Lucy classic “No Children Allowed.” (In Season 4, he even goes so far as to have Allie imagine she’s Lucy Ricardo.) He seems to get restless early on, and after that, cuts away to anything that will energize him: dream sequences, split screens, voice overdubs, flashbacks from the future. (It’s as if he didn’t trust the simplicity of the format, or thought viewers would tire of it, or had tired of it himself.) And he would latch onto an idea and hammer away at it. If his pitch for an episode was “Kate and her new boyfriend are always fighting,“ then they would do nothing but argue for 24 minutes; if it was “Kate’s new boyfriend is a free spirit," he wouldn’t just be free: he’d be reckless and irresponsible. But ironically, it’s in the substandard Season 4 that he produces his masterpiece, as Jennie and her new boyfriend Jason decide to take their relationship to the next level. It’s comprised of unusually short scenes, and it’s surprisingly muted for Randall. There are essentially two big scenes — one with Jason and Jennie at his parents’ apartment, each taking tentative and uneasy steps towards what will be a first time for them, and the other between Allie and Jennie, after Jennie and Jason’s plans have been thwarted by his mother’s early return, and Allie gets wind of it — and they’re both flawless. Jennie and Jason‘s scene has all of the charming awkwardness that you want from a story-line like this; both characters have only one thing on their minds, but both are terrified and eager not to seem too eager. (Jason: “I love you.” Jennie: “I love you too. So – where did your parents go?” Jason: “To my aunt’s house. She has a pool. Do you really?” Jennie: “Yeah. We had a pond in Connecticut.” They kiss. Jason: “Chlorine makes my eyes burn.”) And when Jenny and Allie go at it, it’s at first a tangle of false presumptions and angry accusations; it falls to Allie to regroup and regain her cool, and to learn to speak to her daughter as a friend and not as a mother. The ensuing conversation is as frank as TV sitcoms got in the mid ’80s, a time when most programs had adopted a more conservative tone than a decade earlier. We ultimately learn a lot about Allie through the advice she chooses to impart, as when Jennie, defensive, insists that her mother wants her to “wait for Mr. Right,” and Allie counters, “I don’t believe in Mr. Right. I believe there are many people that you can have a right relationship with. But the point is, wait until it’s right.” To his very great credit, Randall never gets preachy; on the contrary, he undercuts every moment that’s potentially “teachable” with a great character joke, as when Allie instructs Jennie to talk to her doctor about birth control and send her the bill, then instantly reconsiders: “On second thought, send it to your father. Let him worry about it.” And although the two reach a truce by the end, it’s an uneasy one; Jennie makes sure they both agree that it’s her decision, and Allie concedes, “Unfortunately, yes.” For this script, Randall received a Humanitas Award, a win that was well deserved. Also worth a look: the next time Allie has to have “the big talk,” in Season 6’s “Trojan War.” The middle of the episode – an extended set piece where Allie, serving dinner to a group of psychiatrists, gets progressively more sloshed — doesn’t quite come off (it’s too tame), but the opening and final segments are Flett and Ranberg at their best, as Allie finds a condom in Chip’s trousers and has to wait till he returns from a ski trip before she can grill him.

2. Whatever Happened to Romance?: Writing partners Anne Flett and Chuck Ranberg were working as secretaries at Lorimar, churning out spec scripts in their spare time, when they caught the attention of writer-producer Bob Ellison (The Mary Tyler Moore Show). He found them working on a spec script for Kate & Allie, and since he knew Bill Persky, he sent him the script, and Persky liked what he saw. He commissioned Flett and Ranberg to write a second script, and within a short time, they were being relocated to New York City and appointed story editors for Season 3: an infusion of fresh blood the show desperately needed (following the departures of Sherry Coben and Allan Leicht at the end of the previous season). Truly, heaven knows what the show would’ve become if they hadn’t come aboard, because their elegance and effervescence nicely balanced Bob Randall’s bombast. “Whatever Happened to Romance?” was the second script they wrote, but the first to air, and few writers have gotten off to a better start. (In 1985, after seeing their credit at the end of the episode, I made note of them as a team to watch. Little did I know that they would pen most of the best episodes to come.) This one starts with a typical sitcom misunderstanding, when Allie places a want ad that ends up in the personals, but from there it goes to wonderfully fanciful places, as Emma and Jennie become fascinated with one response in particular, from a gentleman who wonders “whatever happened to romance?“ (“Why do we live in co-ops while dreaming of castles in Spain?“). Emma and Jennie’s reveries are as charming and witty as anything the show ever produced. (“I bet he’s tall, dark and handsome, like Matt Dillon.” “Or brilliant and sophisticated like Woody Allen.” “What if it’s the other way around?”) They decide to begin a correspondence with him, posing as a mysterious “Sabrina.” They just have to figure out what sort of photo to enclose: ”If we send him a picture of someone gorgeous, he’ll want to meet her.” “You’re right, let’s send him a picture of one of our moms.” But when they arrange for a rendezvous, to find out what he looks like, then go to the café and see this poor guy waiting – in vain, of course – for Sabrina to materialize, they realize they have to bring the charade to an end. And the only way to do that: to kill off Sabrina — and it’s here that the storyline gets both more twisted and more endearing. (“I’m suffering from consumption,” they write him, after considering and rejecting every disease from Legionnaires to rabies, “and the doctors say it’s only a matter of weeks before I’m completely consumed.”) It’s a New York fairytale quite unlike anything else in the show’s repertoire: a sunny and foolish romantic comedy, a screwball scenario for the ‘80s, envisioned and enacted by two smitten teenagers. It’s enchanting. Also worth a look: another episode about searching for love in all the wrong places, humorist Cynthia Heimel’s Season 6 submission, “My Boyfriend’s Back.” The character of Malcolm Carter, a professor who plies Allie with poetry, had first appeared in Season 3’s “Allie’s Affair.” The Writers Guild must’ve thought that any episode so crammed with verse must be worthy, and handed Bob Randall an award for Best Scripting of an Episodic Comedy. Actor Frank Luz oozes sincerity and sexuality, but nothing else about the episode convinces, least of all Malcolm‘s instant infatuation with Allie. But the follow up, three seasons later, reinvents Malcolm as a hopeless romantic, who this time falls— just as quickly and just as improbably — for Kate. In doing so, it actually legitimizes the earlier episode, and provides a highly entertaining half hour to boot.

1. My Dinner With Kate and Allie: With the kids away at Charles and Claire’s wedding, Kate and Allie take some time for self-reflection, which turns into an evening of feeling sorry for themselves – and self-pity was never so captivating. Coben and Leicht’s “My Dinner with Kate and Allie” concludes Season 2 by encapsulating everything that’s been so bewitching about it: the humor found in tiny character moments and sharp observations, and an unwillingness to stoop to easy laughs; familiar situations refreshed by singular characters, and universal truths disguised as fresh insights; and a genuine feeling of discovery as we continue to explore these women’s lives. Two tangible impasses stand in for the characters’ emotional roadblocks: Kate, still reeling from her break up with Ted, refuses to cut the tags on a dress she bought to wear for him, convinced she’ll never meet another man (Kate: “I’m just gonna take up needlepoint.” Allie: “No one could ever accuse you of being on an even keel”); Allie, who only a few episodes earlier was contemplating a reconciliation with Charles, is still holding on to love letters he wrote her a decade earlier (Kate: “You only kept two?” Allie: “I only got two”). Pretty much every exchange is a miracle, capturing so vividly the way best friends interact and interrupt, as if engaged in one long stream of consciousness. It contains the exchange I most paraphrase from the show, when Kate argues that she won’t keep the dress because she doesn’t need it, and Allie is quick to counter:

Allie: What’s need got to do with it? Do you know how many dresses I own? 23.
Kate: Fascinating.
Allie: Do you know how many dresses I need?
Kate: Six?
Allie: None. I do not have the life I keep shopping for.

And there’s a great monologue for Kate, when Allie asks what she wants, and she confesses, “I really don’t know what I want. I wanted to get married, but I really don’t want to be married. I want a baby, but I honestly don’t want to raise another child. I want to fall in love, but I really don’t think I’m up to the compromises that I’d have to make. I want a man, but I really don’t know of any man that I want.” The audience laughs, not just at how funny it is, but how painfully identifiable it is – did any sitcom ever pull off that feat quite so eloquently? And Allie’s response is the capper: “You have just described the dilemma that affects most women between the ages of puberty and senility.” Through the course of the episode, Kate and Allie make their way up the stairs and into the bedrooms and back down again, into the kitchen and down to the basement and back into the living room; they traverse their home as they revisit their lives, from Allie’s wedding day to Kate’s marriage to Max, from the values imparted to them by two opinionated mothers to the pressures and expectations placed upon them by society. And near the end, using appropriately down-to-earth metaphors (Kate: “Do you know what life is?” Allie: “A fountain.” Kate, ignoring her: “Life is a pie. But sometimes life doesn’t give you the whole pie. Sometimes it just gives you a slice. And the important thing is to eat that slice with relish.” Allie: “Pie with relish. Are you pregnant?”), they start to contemplate and anticipate their futures. As a footnote, the funniest, saddest, truest line in the whole episode – perhaps the whole run — is when Kate suggests they get out of the house and go a little crazy, and Allie (whose idea of throwing caution to the wind is allowing for proper nouns in a game of Scrabble) responds in her own brand of muted hysteria, “I don’t know how to go crazy!” Anyone who’s ever found themselves with nothing to do in a city of a million distractions can relate. Also worth a look: Season 3’s “Ted’s Back,” in which Bob Randall furthers the themes of “My Dinner With Kate and Allie,” as Allie — now in a long-distance relationship with Malcolm — must make peace with letting him go, while Kate and Ted — who ostensibly split up at the end of the previous season — need to finally move on. It’s tender yet funny, incisive but never mean-spirited, and ironically, it reveals more about the bond between Kate and Ted — and why that wasn’t enough to sustain a relationship — than all of Randall’s Ted-centric scripts in Season 2. Marred by two dream sequences that anticipate how the tone will broaden the following year, but the rest is so good, they don’t do much damage.

Do you enjoy in-depth looks at hit shows? If so, I serve up my 10 Best Mary Tyler Moore Show episodes and my 10 Best Designing Women episodes; delve into Rhoda Season 3, Maude Season 2, Newhart Season 7, WKRP in Cincinnati Season 4 and Bewitched Season 2; pen an appreciation of the underrated Mike & Molly; and offer up some thoughts as to why The New Adventures of Old Christine took such a tumble in quality over its five seasons. Or if you have prefer dramas, check out my write-ups of Criminal Minds Season 8, Judging Amy Season 6, Voyager Season 4, Gilmore Girls Season 7 (and the subsequent Netflix miniseries), Cold Case Season 4, and fourteen essays devoted to each season of the great nighttime soap Knots Landing. I also look back at Murder, She Wrote and pick out The 10 Best "Murder She Wrote" Mysteries -- not (necessarily) my top episodes, but the best whodunnits.