It’s Thanksgiving week and, for some of us, that means stressing out over making the biggest meal of the year and/or trying not to fret about what might happen when you mix an unpredictable group of friends and family members, plus adult beverages, with discussions about the Occupy Wall Street protests or the collapse of the Super Committee, together over a Thanksgiving meal.
Tick . . . Tick . . . Boom.
In honor of screwed up American Thanksgiving get-togethers everywhere, I decided to feature some of my favorite TV show families in my Pop Culture column this week.
Among the Thanksgiving episodes that are highlighted:
The awkwardness of Parenthood’s Thanksgiving gathering when Adam and Sarah’s boss (Billy Baldwin) -- who’d forced Adam to fire people then sold the company -- showed up at the big, holiday dinner.
The first Party of Five Thanksgiving that the Salinger orphans had without their parents after they were killed by a drunk driver. Said drunk driver happened to be released from prison a week before Thanksgiving.
The Middle’s forced “happy family” Thanksgiving dinner where Frankie wanted everyone to be loving and emotionally close to one another, even though her husband Mike didn’t even know that his father had just had hip surgery and didn’t tell anyone, or that his brother’s house had burned down. (This week’s new Thanksgiving episode promises another satirical look at the “traditional” family holiday.)
Michael and Hope Steadman’s lousy first Thanksgiving as parents on thirtysomething when Hope wanted to skip the festivities in order to spend a quiet weekend but Michael wanted the whole gang to gather at the Steadman homestead.
Once and Again’s three Thanksgiving episodes, where nothing ever went quite right, despite the valiant efforts of the main character Lily Manning (Sela Ward).
Image credit: AMC
Mad Men’s dreadful scene last year when Betty, while trying to impress her new mother-in-law, shoved a forkful of sweet potato into her daughter’s mouth to prove that Sally liked them, only to have Sally spit them back onto her plate in dramatic fashion.
(Speaking of Mad Men, the show’s creator has revealed to Grantland how he plans to conclude this amazing series: In present day with Don Draper in his 80s. Poor Jon Hamm. He’s going to be J. Edgar-ized like Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar.)
In addition to the new Middle Thanksgiving episode on Wednesday night, watch for Modern Family’s first stab at Thanksgiving humor.
What are your favorite, family-centric Thanksgiving episodes?
When the Wall Street Journal ran a story this past spring saying that Showtime was cultivating a slate of shows featuring dysfunctional, strong women, building on the success of Weeds, I think they were underplaying it.
After watching the first few episodes of the new season of Weeds and the new Laura Linney cancer dramedy The Big C, on top of what they've with Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie and Toni Collette’s United States of Tara the word "dysfunctional" doesn’t quite cover it. I wrote about Showtime's off-beat moms in my latest pop culture column this week.
Cancer on TV
Speaking of The Big C, watching Linney’s Cathy Jamison -- who’s upending her life in the wake of her stage 4 cancer diagnosis -- got me thinking about TV characters and cancer and how other characters dealt with the news.
As I thought about TV and cancer, for some reason, my mind kept going to Charlie Salinger from the 1990s show Party of Five. While Charlie didn't immediately shake things up in his life when he learned he had cancer, he did make some changes after he went into remission. (The video below features the scene where Charlie learned he'd gone into remission and shared the news with his family.)
My CliqueClack TV post looked at Charlie, Kitty Walker from Brothers & Sisters, Lynette Scavo from Desperate Housewives, Walter White from Breaking Bad and Izzie Stevens from Grey’s Anatomy.
Binging on Covert Affairs
I’d only seen a small number of episodes of USA’s new CIA drama Covert Affairs up until this week, when I decided to binge on them. It’s not Alias. Annie Walker is certainly no Sydney Bristow. But Covert Affairs is kind of light, kind of unexpectedly twisty and fun to watch, plus I get to see actors whom I've admired from other shows, like Anna Dudek (who’s fierce on Big Love, was conniving on House and is distinctly 60s suburban mom on Mad Men), Sendhil Ramamurthy (who was the mysterious researcher on Heroes), Peter Gallagher (of late from Rescue Me where he was an unconventional priest), Kari Matchett (who’d been turned into an alien but didn’t know it on Invasion and a political advisor on 24), plus I got to see D.W. Moffett. (Joe McCoy on Friday Night Lights)
*Warning: Spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Lost*
I’ve made a decision which is going to make my life much easier: While watching the recent episode of Lost, called “Lighthouse,” I decided to stop trying so hard to figure it all out and just go with it, Zen-Namaste-Dharma style. Some may call this a cop-out, but (*deep centering breath*) I don’t care.
The turning point in my approach to watching this program occurred in the wee hours of the morning last week after I’d stayed up way too late in the wake of the Locke-centric “The Substitute” episode. I poured through several discs from my Lost DVD collection searching for clues to confirm what I thought I knew about Locke’s history before his fateful plane ride on Oceanic 815. When I toyed with caffeinating up at 1 a.m., I knew that things had gone too far.
I’m no longer going to parse every single statement, search for every single Easter egg, pause the TV and stare wide-eyed at the frozen image hoping to glean some insight. Nope. I’m not. I’m just going to enjoy Lost and not fret over the fact that I don’t have any freakin’ clue, for example, why the uncrashed Jack Shephard has a son, lives in a nice apartment and only sees his kid once a month, when the boy’s not living with his mom, who was not identified. I smiled when Jack told his kid David that he’d hooked up the cable on the TV in his bedroom so that he could watch the Red Sox. (Love that Jack’s a Sox fan.) Since I wasn’t so busy playing Lost detective, I was able to notice similarities between Matthew Fox’s days when he played Charlie Salinger on Party of Five and had a kid sister who was a music prodigy, like Jack Shephard’s son David. Sweet coincidence.
When Jacob decided to give Hurley marching orders because of all this “candidate” business, asked Hurley to write cryptic stuff on his arm and to speak authoritatively to the head of the Other Others, I didn’t let the confusion irritate me, just let it wash over me. (*feeling the Zen*)
I smirked when Hurley responded to ghost Jacob’s request that he try to convince Jack to accompany him on another quest by saying, “Did you ever try to get Jack to do something, it’s, like, impossible.” I derived pleasure from the first moments of levity since the season began when wry music was played as Hurley tried to be all 007-suave and convince Jack to come with him with his quip, “Be cool man, act natural.”
The armed, murderous, booby trap-setting, Rousseau-like, dark-hearted-Man-in-Black buddy Claire -- complete with the wild hair and the “I want my baby back” mission – was entertaining as well, as long as I tried not to think too hard about it. Didn’t even rise to the bait of the lighthouse imagery, a newfangled “wheel” (not the time travel-inducing donkey wheel) and freaky surveillance mirrors (pre-Jack-smash). Not gonna think too hard about it. Not. Gonna.
So I’m, essentially, going along with the ride. As Hurley, often referred to as the voice of the audience, said while he and post-crash/post-Jughead/“broken” Jack walked through the jungle together, “This is cool, dude, very old school . . . on a way to do something that we don’t quite understand. Good times.” Just like my newfound mindset toward watching Lost, the final season: Very cool, although I don’t quite understand. But that’s okay. Which made the latest Lost Untangled video all the more fun to watch. (Loved the line about Jacob being so mysterious.)
What do you think of Jack the Daddy? Of the lighthouse? Of the axe-wielding Claire?
I watched the premiere of V last night on ABC, you know, that new drama about the aliens "visiting" Earth as their ginormous spacecraft hover over the world's biggest cities.
The pilot episode was intriguing, but I think I’m a tad biased because I'm a fan of Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet from Lost) who plays single mom FBI agent Erica Evans on V and has been convinced that the "visitors" want to annihilate humankind. She’s not as enthralled by the attractive, smooth talking aliens as, say Scott Wolf (Bailey from Party of Five) who’s been flirting with the alien's leader, Anna, and, as ambitious TV news guy Chad Decker, is benefitting from being the one journalist on Earth to whom Anna will grant exclusive interviews . . . that is if he agrees not to ask any questions that cast the aliens in an unflattering light.
So there’s a battle coming: The skeptics, like Erica Evans, plan to take on the aliens and subvert them because they believe there's at least one (if not more) sleeper terrorist cell of aliens -- who look human on the outside -- that has been on Earth for some time and whose members are bent on doing evil things. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Earthlings appear to be celebritizing the self-professed peace loving aliens -- who have the power to miraculously heal the sick -- as they entice young people into joining “ambassador” programs and training them aboard their ships. People are selling, "I Love Vs" T-shirts and bowing down reverently in the presence of the "visitors'" ships.
That’s all obviously good potentially dramatic material. On paper. But can the writers maintain the momentum and promise of the pilot, keep things fresh and not get bogged down with minutia and subterfuge too quickly?
Plus, there’s the odd decision made by ABC execs to air four episodes and then go on hiatus until 2010 after the winter Olympics. If V succeeeds in getting traction and ratings, all that will grind to a halt. If it’s stinking up the joint, will ABC just pull the plug? Why not just hold the entire series until 2010 so they could air the 13-episode run in consecutive weeks? This puzzles me.
Anyway, here’s a snippet from last night’s premiere. The scene features Wolf’s character prepping for an interview with chief alien Anna:
Over on ABC’s other cataclysmic/conspiratorial new show FlashForward – where (virtually) everyone on Earth blacked out for nearly three minutes and saw a glimpse of their lives six months into the future – six episodes have aired. As with V, I liked the pilot, but feel as though the show has lost some steam since then, gone creatively astray a bit what with tangents about the crows, a Nazi prisoner and bizarre congressional hearings.
What keeps me tuning in to FlashForward -- there've been a few times when I wanted to just delete an episode, unwatched, from my DVR -- is that I like the main characters and am eager to find out how they get from where they are now to where they are in the flashforwards. (Once that happens, I hope the writers have a logical plan as to what'll they'll do then. Hopefully not another global blackout.)
For example, Sonya Walger (Penelope from Lost) plays Dr. Olivia Benford who’s married to FBI agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes from Shakespeare in Love). In Olivia’s flashforward, she finds herself living in her same house but her daughter, as well as with another man she'd never met and his son Dylan. After they experienced the flashforwards, Dylan became Olivia’s patient and he remembered being in her house and seeing Olivia's daughter during his flashforward. FBI agent Mark is holed up in his office in his flashforward, back on the bottle (his drinking had caused a previous marital separation), and he’s investigating the cause of the blackout when he’s attacked by masked gunmen. Seeing how Olivia and Mark get from point A to point B is what has kept me watching through the nonsense about the crows and the inane power politics of Washington, D.C.
I’m also interested in the storyline for FBI agent Demetri Noh (John Cho), who doesn’t have a flashforward and assumes that that means he’ll be dead before April 29, 2010, the date everyone saw during their blackout. When Demetri posted his experience on a web site where others have posted the details of their flashforwards, he received a call from a woman who said she knows he'll be murdered.
However, as much as I was a fan of Dominic Monaghan when he was the self-sacrificing chap named Charlie on Lost, I can’t stand what I’ve seen of him in FlashForward, but then again, I’m not supposed to. Don’t like his whole sinister this-is-one-big-science-experiment-gone-wrong storyline. Don’t really care either.
The video below is of the man and his son Dylan at Olivia and Mark’s house on Halloween night; both the son and the father realized that this was where their flashforward took place:
While lots of folks like to knock Lost because it’s become so complicated in recent years, it wasn’t that way at first. It was a character drama where a group of strangers crash-landed on an island and were presented with constant, life-threatening situations. The storyline slowly unfolded by explaining the characters and their backstories so viewers felt they understood their present actions and what was motivating them. By the time the show got to the level of Easter eggs and requiring a PhD in Lost-ology in order to understand the episode threads, viewers had already bonded with the characters. Which is why I think it’s important that, while they advance the plot forward (which some viewers complained Lost didn’t do very well in its initial seasons), the V and FlashForward writers need to make sure that they make us care about what happens to the characters in their shows. Otherwise if they waste time with extraneous distractions, they could wind up being high-concept, high-profile bombs on their hands.
