Ellen: The Pregnancy Test

Ellen: The Pregnancy Test
ABC
November 20, 1996
Sitcom
DVD
B

Mark Driscoll wrote this story where Paige thinks she's pregnant, so Audrey suggests that the two of them, and Ellen, take home pregnancy tests.  One of the tests comes out positive, and it's assumed to be Paige's.  Then Paige gets her period, so Audrey seems to be the pregnant one, and so of course blurts this out to Audrey's boyfriend Mike (Dana Gould, who does his most famous joke here, the one about Don Knotts as an obscene phone caller).  In the end, it's just a false positive, but, as Ellen tells her latest therapist (Marilyn Kagan, who was Althea on Mork & Mindy fifteen years earlier), she resents the implication that she couldn't be a mother.  There's a definite subtext that Ellen is avoiding dealing with her sexuality, but even on a surface level, we see that she feels different from her friends, and has all her life.

Chris D'Arienzo plays a nameless Customer again.  ZZ Top appear in this week's title sequence, and, yes, Ellen wears a beard for that.  Alan Myerson previously directed, among many series, The Bob Newhart Show and Welcome Back, Kotter; he'd do two more for Ellen.