Texas Chili
S5 E26: My Master, The Chili King
I Dream of Jeannie, 1965.
In the grand and noble tradition of American television finales, those solemn occasions when characters we’ve known for years confront their fates, their growth, their mortality, I Dream of Jeannie ended with beans.
Cousin Arvel, a traveling salesman in the time-honored Texan mold of “everything’s bigger, especially the scam,” arrives in Cocoa Beach to bless the Nelson household with his latest entrepreneurial revelation: chili. Texas chili. A product so potent it could secure “financial security” for Tony once he’s too old to “fly them moon rockets.” It’s a touching vision of retirement: the American hero as chili magnate.
Jeannie, being both helpful and supernatural, interprets “launching a chili brand” not as a business venture requiring permits, distribution, or a single human conversation, but as a simple matter of blinking hundreds of cans into existence and placing them on grocery shelves. No contracts, no invoices, just the pure, uncut power of consumer manifestation.
The result? Instant success. Cousin Tony’s Texas Chili, featuring the smiling astronaut himself, appears in supermarkets, cafeterias, and (crucially) the Air Force commissary, because Jeannie’s magic apparently bypasses the Pentagon’s supply chain. Sales are brisk. Confusion is rampant. Mrs. Bellows, the eternal bringer of doom, spots Tony’s face on a can and immediately interprets it as a moral collapse of the U.S. space program.
Meanwhile, Tony—who has survived space travel, multiple near-exposures of his genie wife, and years of Roger Healey’s friendship—finds himself facing the gravest threat of all: a military ethics violation involving legumes.
General Schaeffer fumes. Dr. Bellows pontificates. Jeannie blinks the chili into grapes. America is safe again.
And there, without so much as a wistful goodbye or a final twinkle of the bottle, the series ends, not with Tony and Jeannie riding off into domestic bliss, but with a pyramid scheme, a canning fiasco, and Roger Healey once again being swindled by the same man for thirty-five dollars and a fake cufflink.
It’s perfect, really. The finale of I Dream of Jeannie is not about closure. It’s about the American dream itself—an unregulated mixture of charm, delusion, and chili.
Make it! Authentic Texas Chili from Billy Parisi.