Season 7 Episode 7: The Chicago Wine Party

November 1, 1992

Published 11/01/92

This one aired two days before the 1992 presidential election, and it is the closest Married with Children ever came to making an actual political argument. There is a referendum on the ballot: a two cent tax on beer. Al, who has never voted and has no intention of starting, discovers that something he cares about is on the line and becomes a campaigner. The episode opens with one of the best cold opens the series ever shot, a long slow walk home by a man in disintegrating shoes, scored to Bela Fleck’s “Flight of the Cosmic Hippo” with no dialogue at all. From there Al builds a movement, delivers a speech invoking the Boston Tea Party, and gets the working men of Chicago organized around the one issue that reaches them. Marcy, meanwhile, has her own voter strategy, which involves giving the Bundys lawn signs for positions she opposes on the theory that the neighborhood will reflexively vote the other way. She calls it Harnessing Hate. Jefferson spends the episode explaining, at length and unprompted, his qualifications for the role of First Lady, a monologue that takes in national hair care centers and ends somewhere genuinely disturbing. And the local news coverage is handled by a reporter whose approach to low viewership is to show the camera her garter belt. The tax passes. Al’s closing speech about who gets what in America is the most sincere thing the character says all season. It is one of the few episodes that leaves Al with his dignity intact and the system, rather than Al, as the thing that failed.

Episode Facts

Original air date: November 1, 1992
Season and episode: Season 7, Episode 7
Overall episode number: 138
Written by: Stacie Lipp
Directed by: Gerry Cohen
Taped: October 16, 1992
Production note: Broadcast two days before the 1992 U.S. presidential election.
Production note: The opening walk is scored to “Flight of the Cosmic Hippo” by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Some cable prints cut the first half of it.
Title note: A reference to the Boston Tea Party, which Al also invokes in his speech.