S5 E15: Merlot Down Dirty Shame
American Dad, 20th Television Animation, 2005.
In “Merlot Down Dirty Shame,” American Dad! asks one of the great questions of our age: how far would you go to preserve a friendship built around matching high-five necklaces?
For Roger, the answer is somewhere past lying, emotional manipulation, kidnapping, and burying your best friend’s wife alive, but not so far past ordinary social convention that you would neglect to pack her lunch. Roger may be a multi-faceted criminal, but he isn’t a monster.
The trouble begins innocently enough, which is how trouble prefers to begin when Roger is involved. Stan bails on a long-planned wine-country trip with Francine and sends Roger in his place. One afternoon of tastings becomes several drinks, then several more drinks, then the kind of evening where no railing can be trusted. Roger, drunk and overly invested in protecting Stan’s honor, kisses Francine. She immediately rejects him. Roger immediately regrets it. Francine, behaving with the exhausting good sense of someone trapped in a sitcom, decides she should tell her husband.
Roger cannot allow this because Stan is his best friend now. There’s jewelry.
What follows is less a cover-up than a one-alien demonstration of how a small problem can become a felony through enthusiasm. Roger stalls. Roger lies. Roger knocks Francine unconscious. Roger buries her underground and tells Stan the muffled screaming is his sore calves. Then, because Francine is still technically a houseguest in the shallow grave he has dug for her, he brings refreshments.
“Sun Fresh chips, right? And a sandwich,” Roger calls down through the air pipe, attempting to shove both through a tube clearly designed for oxygen. “Did you get any of the chips? They’re Sun Fresh chips. They’re healthy for you. Healthier than regular chips.” They are not.
It’s a pure American Dad! meal: a supermarket sandwich and a bag of dubiously health-coded chips served to a woman who has been kidnapped by an alien trying to save his friendship with her husband. The sandwich itself is beside the point. We never receive the dignity of knowing what is in it. Turkey? Ham? Egg salad? Roger has committed enough crimes by now that tuna would barely register. The important thing is that he remembered one. There is something almost sweet about the gesture if you ignore every surrounding circumstance.
Sun Fresh, meanwhile, is exactly the kind of fictional snack brand this universe deserves. The name promises produce aisle optimism: sunshine, freshness, possibly a sensible serving of whole grains. The bag contains chips. Roger’s insistence that they are “healthier than regular chips” feels like a statement he has repeated often enough to become part of his personal constitution.
Eventually Roger’s scheme collapses. He admits the truth only after realizing that Stan’s potential divorce would mean selling the house, thereby costing Roger his attic. This is not remorse in the traditional sense. It is closer to real-estate awareness. Still, by then the Sun Fresh chips have already performed their short noble duty: proving that even at the absolute bottom of Roger’s moral descent, he remains unwilling to let a guest go without a snack.
Make it! Cheesy Sun Crisps from Taste of Home