In January, I decided to do a soft relaunch of this blog, challenging myself to find something I was happy about in pop culture to write about once a week. And although I’ve been pretty successful with that goal so far, it hasn’t always been easy. This week, for example. This week’s post is scheduled for Nov. 17, the last Friday before Thanksgiving, and in a situation like that my normal inclination is to write something about the culture of the holiday, an exploration of some of the classic movies or specials that I always associate with the season, that I revisit every year, and that helps enrich and makes the holidays more meaningful for me. There’s only one problem. In that November, there isn’t that much to be thankful for.

Christmas is easy – there are thousands of Christmas-themed films, TV shows, books, and comics I can turn to, and between Hallmark and the Lifetime Channel they’ve turned out 17 more since we began reading this sentence. Halloween, similarly, isn’t difficult. There are a lot of Halloween-specific movies, and really, anything on the creepy spectrum can feel Halloween-appropriate, even if it’s not set around Samhain. Thanksgiving, though? That’s tougher. 

There are a few Thanksgiving movies, but to date there’s really only been one GREAT Thanksgiving movie, and that’s the 1987 classic Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. If you’ve never seen it, I recommend you check it out before next week: Steve Martin plays an executive trying to get home from a business trip in time for Thanksgiving, and absolutely everything goes wrong. But he’s not alone: fate seems to have linked his travel mishaps with a buffoonish shower curtain ring salesman (really) played by the late, great John Candy. Both of these comedians are at the top of their game in this movie – Steve Martin plays the straight man for most of the film, save for one memorable freak-out scene at a rental car counter, and Candy manages to pull the viewer on a roller coaster ride that makes his character at turns goofy, charming, unbearable, sympathetic, and even tragic. My wife Erin contends (and I do not disagree) that if Candy hadn’t passed away at such a young age, he would have had a late-career dramatic renaissance like John Goodman or Bryan Cranston. And while I wouldn’t change anything about the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, there’s an alternate reality out there where Candy lived long enough to play Saul Goodman, and I bet that’s really interesting. At any rate, this scene shows hints of that dramatic master that, sadly, will never be. There are several must-see movies every Christmas and Halloween for me, but out of all the Thanksgiving movies that exist, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is the only one I go out of my way to watch every year. 

The first runner up would probably be Fun in Balloon Land, a horrific fever dream of a film where a child wanders through a fairy land made up of hideous balloon people at the behest of a creepy narrator, intercut with scenes of the world’s most boring Thanksgiving parade. This film is truly an abomination, but the good people of RiffTrax have put out a commentary track that is a favorite of mine.

But that’s it? Only two really memorable movies? One and a half, really – Balloon Land isn’t even an hour long. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year. I feel like it deserves more. 

(This is the point where someone in the comments will point out Eli Roth’s new holiday slasher flick Thanksgiving, now playing. But I haven’t seen it yet, and even if I had, I feel like a minimum of five years needs to pass before it’s fair to designate a movie as a potential “classic.” Get back to me in 2028.)

So there aren’t enough Thanksgiving movies, that’s clear. But what about holiday specials? Once again, there are some to choose from, but not as many as the other two third quarter holidays. There’s Bugs Bunny’s Thanksgiving Diet, one of the late 70s/early 80s compilation Looney Tunes specials that wraps a new framing sequence around clips from the classic cartoons. BC’s The First Thanksgiving is…weird, although thematically it at least makes a little more sense than the Christmas special. Alvin and the Chipmunks: A Chipmunk Celebration? This is baffling, as it is CLEARLY a Thanksgiving special, but they NEVER EVEN SAY THE WORD “THANKSGIVING.” They dance around it, referring to the “holiday,” which is utterly bizarre to me. Thanksgiving doesn’t even have the religious connotations that make some modern specials afraid to mention Christmas, and what’s more, this came out in 1994. Does David Seville just despise the concept of “thanks”?

Nah, just like Christmas and Halloween, the top two specials belong to our friends from the newspaper pages: A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Garfield’s Thanksgiving. The former features the legendary sequence in which Charlie Brown serves a highly-ungrateful Peppermint Patty a Thanksgiving dinner of popcorn, toast, pretzels, and jellybeans. It’s a classic bit, and it really makes me wonder why Kellogg’s, who released a Great Pumpkin-themed cereal for Halloween this year, didn’t follow suit with a cereal that looks like popcorn and jellybeans.

As for Garfield, this special is second only to his legendary Halloween adventure, showing Jon finally get a date with Liz the Vet, who bizarrely agrees to a first date of having Thanksgiving dinner with him. Jon being Jon, though, he totally fouls up the dinner, and winds up having to call Grandma Arbuckle to save the day. The special is great, with some of the surreal humor that made Garfield back in the day so much fun. Plus, you know how sometimes they manage to make cartoon food look so good that you crave it in real life? If I could bring one cartoon character into the real world, I’d have Grandma Arbuckle show up to make dinner. 

If there’s one area where Thanksgiving does have a little bit of traction in pop culture, it’s in the world of the television comedy. For decades, the sitcom has used Thanksgiving as a backdrop for some classic episodes, and there are few reasons for this. First of all, with the traditional television season running from September to May, shows (especially live-action ones) would usually keep the series more or less in real time. In other words, an episode that first aired in September was usually set during September, a show that aired in February was usually set in February, and so forth. That made it easy – and even logical – to use holidays to mark the passage of time. In this streaming era, though, that concept may be endangered – when Netflix drops an entire season of a comedy in mid-July, it makes little sense to have a holiday episode. (This was even lampshaded in the first season of their Mystery Science Theater 3000 reboot, where they had a Christmas episode, but the characters quipped that people binging the series wouldn’t be watching it anywhere near Christmas.) 

The other reason is that a large number of sitcoms, historically speaking, have been about some type of family: either a traditional nuclear family, a nontraditional family, or about the “found family” that we sometimes create with a group of friends or closely-knit co-workers. As Thanksgiving is arguably the holiday most associated with family as a concept, it only makes sense to tell stories about those families at Thanksgiving. 

Although many sitcoms have had Thanksgiving episodes, there are two that elevated it to an artform: Friends and Bob’s Burgers. The gang at Central Perk made up what is possibly the most recognizable example of the “found family” sitcom in history, and although every one of the main six characters had at least one other biological family member they could have spent the day with, after the first season (where their respective plans all fell apart and they instead spent the holiday together), they rarely made a comment about spending Thanksgiving with anybody but each other. This resulted in some legendary episodes, including “The One With the Football” (in which a touch football game goes wildly out of hand), and “The One With All the Thanksgivings,” (where they reminisce about Thanksgivings past and, quite memorably, Chandler first tells Monica that he loves her while she has a turkey on her head). 

Bob’s Burgers, meanwhile, is a show about a family that owns a burger joint, with the titular Bob being a chef with dreams of grandeur, and who sees cooking Thanksgiving dinner as a point of personal pride and a constant challenge to outdo himself. Being an animated series, the shows often get far wilder than you would often see in live action, such as the Thanksgiving where a stampede of turkeys trapped the kids in an amusement park ride, the one where Bob has to drag his wife’s injured sister to Thanksgiving dinner in a blizzard, or the time a school Thanksgiving pageant turns into a horrific and hilarious gorefest. At the core, though, this is a show about a family that sincerely and deeply loves each other, and the Thanksgiving episodes are often some of the finest reflections of that. 

Both of these shows would make for fine Thanksgiving marathons. If only Max and Hulu (the streaming services that have them) would wise up and include a button that allows you to watch all the Thanksgiving episodes in order. We know the technology exists, people. Warner Bros., Disney? Are you listening? I’m putting you on notice: I want a “Play Thanksgiving” button come November 2024.

And of course, no discussion of Thanksgiving episodes would be complete without what is perhaps the most legendary one of them all: WKRP in Cincinnati’s “Turkeys Away.” In this episode, the manager of the titular radio station decides to stage a Thanksgiving publicity stunt by escalating a turkey giveaway to preposterous levels. This is the first episode anybody thinks of when they think of WKRP, and even people who’ve never watched the series may still be familiar with the episode’s final line, a killer punchline that has resonated in the annals of sitcom history, but which I will not spoil here for anybody who hasn’t watched the episode. It’s a classic piece of television, but it also has one perplexing footnote. The original air date for this piece of Thanksgiving history? October 30, 1978 – the day before Halloween.

Still, even with these examples I have provided, it should be clear that Thanksgiving has gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to classic pieces of entertainment. I can binge Halloween specials and horror movies all October long. And once Santa comes down Main Street in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, there are more than enough Christmas movies, specials, and TV shows to keep me pleasantly stuffed until Twelfth Night in January. But even with a relatively short 22 days between Halloween and Thanksgiving, like we have this year, there just isn’t enough content to fill it all up. So to all the people out there who make movies and TV shows, I implore you: give Thanksgiving a chance. With such relatively little competition, it really wouldn’t be that hard to make the next definitive piece of Thanksgiving culture. 

I’m putting you on the same timeline as the Hulu and Max people. You got one year, folks, or I may just have to do it myself.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He realizes that he neglected to mention one specific Lifetime Thanksgiving movie, the 2015 film Jim Henson’s Turkey Hollow, produced by the Jim Henson Company and based on an idea from the legendary Jim Henson before his untimely death. It was a’ight.