Season 10 Episode 24: Kiss of the Coffee Woman

May 5, 1996

Published 05/05/96

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.