Season 10 Episode 24: Kiss of the Coffee Woman

Kelly lands a commercial for a brand called Romantic Roast, a serial campaign in which a couple’s relationship develops across successive advertisements, the format British viewers would have recognised immediately from the Gold Blend ads of the late eighties. Her male lead, Lance, is fired on the first day, and the replacement is Jefferson, who happens to be on the premises because Marcy has locked him out of the house until he finds work. He is also, at that point, occupying the Bundy couch and eating bonbons, which prompts Al to deliver a speech he has clearly been saving for his wife.

The campaign takes off and Jefferson becomes a local sex symbol, which creates two problems. Marcy, watching her husband’s fame arrive, starts worrying aloud that he will leave her and brings up Steve Rhoades for the first time in years, a surprisingly raw note in an otherwise light half-hour. Al’s problem is that the next instalment requires Jefferson and Kelly to kiss, and the episode’s best scene is his attempt to talk his daughter out of it, which moves from fatherly advice to a frank assessment of his weight and reach advantage within two lines.

That conversation produces the wallet exchange, which is the series at its most efficiently ridiculous: Al produces a baby photograph he has carried for years, Kelly points out it is not her, Bud points out it is the stock photo the wallet came with, and Al defends the choice as symbolic before the nationality of the child in the picture derails everything. The episode closes with Al and Marcy performing the commercial’s bedroom scene themselves, stiffly, while the crew dismantles the set around them, played out under the credits instead of the usual freeze frame.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, May 5, 1996 on FOX
• Season 10, Episode 24
• Overall episode 236 of the series
• Taped March 8, 1996; production code 10.25
• Written by Todd Newman
• Directed by Sam W. Orender
• The title plays on the 1985 drama Kiss of the Spider Woman
• Katey Sagal does not appear; she was on maternity leave

Guest Cast

• Leland Orser as the Director
• Brian Stewart as Lance
• Andrea Nittoli as Linda
• Karen Lynn Scott as Dina
• Susan Slome as Becca

Romantic Roast

The Romantic Roast campaign is a direct spoof of the Gold Blend advertisements Nestlé ran in Britain from the late 1980s, in which a couple’s slow-burning romance played out across instalments, each ending on a cliffhanger. Dropping Jefferson into that format is a good joke on two levels: he is pure surface, which is exactly what the campaign needs, and he has never in ten seasons held down a job, which is the only reason he is available.

Marcy’s reaction is the episode’s unexpected soft spot. Rather than play her as possessive for laughs, the script lets her be frightened, and the fear she reaches for is specific: Steve Rhoades left her, and the show has not raised that in a long while. Amanda Bearse plays it as a genuine worry wrapped in a joke, and it gives the half-hour more weight than a commercial-shoot plot would otherwise carry.

Al’s objection to the kiss is where the comedy lives, and the wallet photograph is one of the great late-series bits. The gag is layered: he has carried a stranger’s picture for years believing it to be sentimental, he defends it as symbolic once caught, and then reveals an entirely separate and much stranger wish about his daughter. Kelly’s tearful apology for not being Chinese, and Al’s immediate consoling hug, is the kind of exchange only this show could land.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “I’m sick of coming home, seeing you holding down the couch, watching Oprah, and stuffing your face full of bonbons. Now you either get your lazy ass in the kitchen and cook me a meal, or get out!” Delivered to Jefferson, who is in Peggy’s spot.
• Jefferson: “Marcy won’t let me back in the house until I have a job. If you kick me out too… where will I go?” / Al: “Don’t know, don’t care.”
• Al: “Kelly, I’ve given you good fatherly advice in the past.” / Kelly: “Daddy, you have never given me fatherly advice.” / Al: “Okay, then here’s some advice from someone 100 pounds heavier with an 8-inch reach advantage: you are not kissing the neighbor!”
• Al: “Why do you think I carry your baby picture in my wallet?” / Kelly: “That’s not me, Dad.” / Bud: “That’s the picture that came with the wallet!”
• Al: “When I bought this wallet, I had a choice: a little boy or a little girl. I picked the little girl. She’s… symbolic.” / Kelly: “She’s Chinese, Dad!” / Al: “THAT’S WHAT I WAS HOPING YOU WOULD BE!”
• Al: “Well, because I… I want to keep you pure.” / Bud: “Well, we better call Mr. Peabody and the WAAAAAAA-BAC machine.”

Notes

• This is the third and final appearance of Leland Orser as the director Kelly keeps working with, after “The Naked and the Dead, But Mostly the Naked” and “The Two That Got Away.”
• Marcy raises her first marriage, mentioning that Steve Rhoades left her, a rare late-series reference.
• Karen Lynn Scott, who plays the woman who mistakes Marcy for Jefferson’s mother, had appeared in season six’s “I Who Have Nothing” as Al’s gold-digging Aunt Heather.
• The credits roll over a continuation of the final scene, Al and Marcy stiffly acting out Lance and Lyla’s bedroom scene while the crew strikes the set, rather than the usual still frame.
• Oddly, the DVD release keeps that closing scene intact but pairs it with the edited credits that drop the “Love and Marriage” cue.
• Set-dressing continuity: the bulletin board with the yellow MCAT notice visible outside the soundstage doors is the same one used in the previous episode’s library study room.