the twist
The plot: Carrie gets jealous when her mother-in-law spends time with her husband's ex-girlfriend instead of her. I would expect the dialogue in an episode with such a plot to constantly refer to how strange it is for the woman to be concerned about her mother-in-law's attention rather than her husband's. Instead, the writers took a fair risk by not referring to the obvious source of humor - not until the end, when the audience has assumedly forgotten about it already.
Why was Carrie's reaction so strong when she didn't even get along with her mother-in-law? It's because of Carrie's insecurity, which, along with Doug's, is the driving force of the series. And again, the show uses the plot device parallelling a platonic type of relationship with a romance, in this case the one between Janet and Margy. Man, that never gets old, even after seeing it repeatedly in the same series.
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