Thanksgiving, TV Style: From 'Cheers' & 'The Gilmore Girls' to 'Mad About You'

Two weeks from now, most of us will be attending or hosting Thanksgiving dinners, mixing all manner of family and friends, including some folks who shouldn't be combined regardless of how much wine is served with dinner. In anticipation of this uniquely American holiday, my mind, of course, turned to TV and some of the Thanksgiving episodes from my favorite TV shows.

For me, THE quintessential Thanksgiving TV episode has to be the Cheers one which ended in a messy food fight with cranberry sauce dripping off of Diane Chambers’ face and splattered across her over-the-top, Pilgrim outfit. Later, just as viewers were about to see what Norm’s wife Vera looked like, she got clobbered in the face with a pie thrown, ironically, by Diane. Who isn’t tempted to start a food fight on Thanksgiving from time to time?

Happy Thanksgiving - WKRP Turkey Drop - kewego

WKRP: The other “classic” Thanksgiving episode is, without question, the WKRP turkey drop one. Even though I was a kid when I saw this in repeats, I still remember practically every detail:

The location was the Pine Dale Shopping Center. Les Nesman was on the scene declaring that “the greatest turkey event in Thanksgiving Day history” was about to happen. Then the people and cars in the shopping plaza's parking lot were bombarded via helicopter with non-flying live turkeys. The episode was capped by a rumpled, traumatized Mr. Carlson saying, “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”



Mad About You: Jamie and Paul Buchman hosted their first Thanksgiving dinner for their parents, family and friends as they were assaulted with an array of pointed darts of passive aggression coming at them from all angles as they tried to awkwardly blend the styles and traditions of the two families. For example, when Jamie and Paul said the dinner would be “buffet style,” their parents scoffed and opted to go “another way” when they weren't in the room, setting the table more traditionally. Paul's father insisted that there be canned cranberry sauce (as opposed to the homemade sauce Jamie was making). Paul's mother brought a sweet potato dish and said the one that Jamie made -- the one without the marshmallows -- could be stowed away in the freezer. The clincher was when the dog had hopped up on the counter and ate the turkey they'd prepared.

Image credit: AMC via Best Television Shows

Once and Again: This show, starring Sela Ward, focused on the impact of divorce on families with children. In its first season, Ward’s not-quite-divorced-yet Lily had Thanksgiving dinner at her house with her kids, her sister and her parents, who brought with them her estranged husband Jake -- whom Lily had explicitly NOT invited -- while her boyfriend Rick was lurking outside the house on the sidewalk waiting for her to come out. Rick appeared miserably lonely while his own children were spending the day at his ex-wife’s house, where she'd invited colleagues from work and her current boyfriend to spend the day. There was fighting and screaming and some lies were tossed about . . . just your garden variety American Thanksgiving.

Mad Men: The first episode of the fourth season, which recently concluded, contained what’s soon to be a classic Thanksgiving scene: Betty Draper Francis forced her daughter Sally to eat some of Betty's new mother-in-law’s sweet potatoes, which Sally promptly spat out onto her plate (gagged on them, really). Betty dragged Sally out of the room while Sally yelled from off camera for her mother to stop pinching her. Meanwhile the deeply depressed Don was in his darkened apartment insisting that the prostitute he hired repeatedly hit him in the face. (Jezebel has a good video clip – second video down -- of the scene in question.)



Gilmore Girls: Remember the year when Lorelai and Rory just could not say, “No” to Luke, the Kims, Sookie or Richard and Emily and wound up attending four Thanksgiving dinners in one day? The odd collection of dinners included one tofurkey, one deep fried turkey, an argument about vases and flowers followed by stilted conversation and an openly hostile shouting match held across a well appointed table.

thirtysomething: In season one, Hope was reluctant to host Thanksgiving dinner for all their friends. She wanted to spend a quiet holiday with just her, Michael and their baby. But Michael persisted and whined that they should have a Thanksgiving dinner. The compromise was that Hope would allow him to have the dinner, but she was going to do something else, like sort through photos. Then Michael and the baby got sick, quickly followed by Hope. However their friends pulled together, something, kind of -- Elliot and Nancy took their kids out for fast food -- and wound up piling into Hope’s bed at the end of the night, one big, happy, messy, sick family.

Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving TV episode?

Image credit: AMC via Best Television Shows.

Feeling Stressed Out by the Prospect of Thanksgiving Dinner? Play Dysfunctional Family Bingo

If you're a person who's concerned about what odd/uncomfortable/upsetting/infuriating thing might occur during your Thanksgiving celebration with your family, then you might want to consider taking a peek at my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card which I've posted on my other blog. It's a Bingo card whose squares are filled with weird/irritating events that could plausibly occur during your family's celebration of gratitude. It's not a Bingo game that you actually want to win, though, unless you're into that sort of self-torture thing.

It's meant to be a humorous albeit snarky way to remember that nobody actually has perfect Bree Van de Kamp Hodge/Martha Stewart holiday dinners with family.

The New York Times obliquely referenced Dysfunctional Family Bingo -- a concept created by a Massachusetts psychologist in 2000 -- in its Science section today in an article entitled, "Food, Kin and Tension at Thanksgiving." Some of the anecdotes mentioned in the story could've made for good entries for my Dysfunctional Family Bingo card, including this one:

"[The director of a university-based eating disorders program] told the story of a patient whose mother scolded her for not eating her homemade cookies. 'You don't like my cookies?' she asked. As a result, the daughter relented and took a cookie. But when she then reached for a second, her mother scolded her again. 'Do you really think you need another one?' she asked her."

Please Help Me Out with the Dysfunctional Family Bingo Contest, You Could Win an Autographed Book

* Cross-posted on the Picket Fence Post blog. *

For the past few years I’ve addressed the issue of holiday stress – particularly when you gather multiple generations together for a high-pressure holiday dinner — by creating Dysfunctional Family Bingo cards. I take awkward-but-realistic scenarios that might occur during (before or after) your family’s Thanksgiving dinner and place each one into a box on a BINGO card and pray that no one checks off enough boxes to actually win.

In some twisted way, writing up all of these scenarios amuses me and serves as a reminder that EVERYONE experiences a bit of familial dysfunction during holiday dinners so we may as well just find the humor in them. (For the full history of Dysfunctional Family Bingo, go here.)

What kinds of scenarios am I talking about? For the past couple years, I’ve used a few of my own holiday experiences (though there’s no way I’m ‘fessing up which ones are autobiographical) as well as some which my friends have shared with me in order to fill out each box on the Bingo card. Here are a few from my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card:

– Some older children at the gathering taught your impressionable young child how to spit, the glory of purple nurples and new vocabulary words like the “F” word.

– Your mother suggests that you join her in starting a diet in the new year, noting that your pants are getting “a bit snug” and asks you if you’ve ever heard of the term “muffin top.”

– It gets heated when several members of the family cannot agree on the best, fastest route to take from this location to the mall.

– A male relative drags you outside and points out everything that’s wrong with your house, from the roof and gutters, to the window screens and the chimney.

– Maxi pads, whose box you had tucked away in a bathroom cabinet, were taken out by a young nephew who decided to remove the paper strips on the back and stick them all over the bathroom wall in a random pattern.

This year, I’m going to ask you, my smart and witty blog readers, to please contribute YOUR OWN oddball/dysfunctional family holiday dinner scenarios which could happen (or have happened) during the celebration of Thanksgiving. I’ll use reader suggestions along with my own to create my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. Please e-mail me your contribution (everybody’s got to have at least one amusing scenario) — to meredithobrien@hotmail.com — no later than noon on Monday, November 23.

The best four contributions (as determined by me) will earn their creators an autographed and personalized copy of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum, where the motto is, “Parenting is best done with a hearty sense of humor.” Looking forward to reading your e-mails!

Image credit: AP.

Holiday Dinners Stress You Out? Play Dysfunctional Family Bingo

This year The Spouse and I are NOT -- I repeat -- NOT hosting a Thanksgiving dinner at our house as we have for several consecutive years. We will not be deep frying our turkey in the backyard while I pray that The Spouse doesn't set something on fire, arguing over whether the corn bread stuffing we've made is moist enough or whether we've made a sufficient amount of mashed potatoes.

But that does not mean we are immune to the stress that often accompanies attending BIG holiday celebrations. (And I'm not even talkin' Christmas yet.) Thus the creation of my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card that's currently up at my parenting blog, the Picket Fence Post. It's a bingo card whose squares are filled with potentially awful scenarios that could occur during a family holiday dinner. Believe me, this is a game you do not want to win.

For years, my friends and I would joke about secretly playing Dysfunctional Family Bingo, particularly after sharing a number of war stories about our experiences. Now we've opened up the game to everyone. Feel free to play along, or just add your own loony holiday dinner story(stories) in the comments section. Remember, no one ever has a perfect holiday celebration.

Happy Thanksgiving!