frasier

Geek Punditry #128: The Dad Scale

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This weekend is Father’s Day, the one day a year in which people pretend to appreciate all the things that fathers do for their family. But I mean, it’s tough – after all, where are our role models in the world of pop culture? If you look in the annals of fiction, the number of truly good, successful fathers is completely overwhelmed by the gargantuan number who act like buffoons. There was a 20-year stretch from around 1990 through 2010 when it was federally mandated that at least 47 percent of all television comedies feature a father who was an absolute idiot married to a woman who treated him like he was an absolute idiot, but it was acceptable because she was hotter than he was.

But even though these lousy dads get the focus, is that really fair? There ARE good fathers in fiction, just like there are bad ones. Just like real life. So today, in Geek Punditry, I’m going to choose some fictional dads and rank them on a scale from the best to the worst. 

(In the interest of completion, I should mention that we here at Geek Punditry Global Headquarters and While-U-Wait Notary Services are, of course, aware of the exploits of one Theodore Huxtable. Had this column been written a decade ago, he most assuredly would have been ranked among the top dads in fiction. However, through no fault of the character, Cliff’s legacy has been tarnished by the actor who PLAYED him, so we’re going to pass on further comment.)

BEST: Bandit Heeler.

It’s been a minute since I talked about Bluey here in this column, but that’s mostly because it’s been a year since the last new episode, so I’ve had to content myself with reruns. But let’s make no mistake – of all the fathers in the annals of popular fiction, it’s hard to argue that anyone is more devoted than Bandit Heeler. Bandit’s daughters are two little balls of chaos, full of life and energy, and also constantly dragging their dad into their games. And Bandit steps up every time – he plays along, he expands the world of the game, and he occasionally uses it to teach a lesson.

But he makes mistakes, of course. He does – on rare occasions – show his exasperation with his kids. And his attempts at teaching a lesson can sometimes fall on deaf ears, such as in the episode “Magic Claw,” in which he persuades the girls to do chores to get money for a “claw machine,” played by Bandit himself. “They’re learning a valuable lesson, and we’re getting the house clean!” he says. His wife Chili, simply shakes her head and says “Neither of those things are happening.” But when the lesson fails, Bandit rolls with the punches, accepting that sometimes the lesson that needs to be learned is his own.

When he is offered a chance to move to another town for more money, in “The Sign,” he takes that job not because he wants to leave his home in Brisbane, but because he thinks it will make a better life for his wife and kids. And when he realizes that neither his wife nor his kids actually WANT to leave, that they are perfectly content with the good life they already have, Bandit wisely steps back from the transfer. He sees they don’t need money to chase happiness, as they already have it.

Bandit is the dad that every dad in the world wants to live up to. It’s not just a meme. It’s the truth.

WORST: Victor Frankenstein

He may not be a biological father, but every bit of tragedy that can be wrung out of the pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be boiled down to parental abandonment. In his thirst to conquer death, Victor creates a creature out of the corpses of the dead and uses an arcane process to infuse it with life. He brings a new, intelligent being into the world, and by any reasonable definition of the word, that makes him the creature’s father. So what’s the first thing Victor does upon achieving parenthood?

He abandons his son.

He is so horrified by seeing this collection of corpses come to life that he runs in terror, leaving it alone. And at this point, it should be noted, the creature is analogous to a baby – his mind is a blank slate. He knows nothing, understands nothing. He wanders into the woods where he spies on a family long enough to learn things like language, then when he tries to join them, he is rejected again. He grows understandably angry and bitter, and decides (less understandably) to take his rage out on the entire human race, but ESPECIALLY on dear ol’ dad. 

Had Victor taken half a second to stop, to THINK, it all may have been avoided – the death of his brother, the death of his fiancé, the deaths of all the other people who crossed the creature’s path at the wrong time. Had he actually attempted to RAISE his creature, as a father should, things may have been very, very different. But he was weak, he was foolish, and he ran, leaving an embryo to turn into an abomination. Short of direct abuse, abandonment is as low on the scale of parenthood as you can get. 

So there’s our rating scale, friends. At the top, Bandit Heeler at 100 percent. At the bottom is Victor Frankenstein with a big honkin’ zero. Let’s grab a few other dads from the world of fiction and see where they measure up. This isn’t a comprehensive list, mind you, just the first few fictional dads that occurred to me (and that I thought would be interesting to write about). 

Bob Belcher, Bob’s Burgers

Bob Belcher is the father of three children, plus his wife Linda, who can at times be the equivalent of two more. Plus his best friend (or best “customer” depending on when you ask him) Teddy, so that’s like eight. And while Bob is constantly worried, anxious, and long-suffering with a restaurant that barely seems to break even, there’s one thing that you can never say about Bob, and that’s that he doesn’t love his kids. Tina, Gene, and Louise would each be a handful on their own. They are, respectively, a neurotic boy-crazed preteen girl who seems to share his anxiety issues, a middle child who has taken the middle child hunger for attention to an absurd extreme, and a little demon more devoted to pandemonium than anything else. Any ONE of Bob’s kids could wear a parent to the nub.

But although Bob’s frustration is constant, he does his best to keep from taking it out on the kids. He supports them. He cares about them. No matter how bizarre or incomprehensible their latest obsession may be, Bob never once shames them or even tries to talk them out of it, unless it’s a situation where he feels they may be in actual danger (physical or emotional). When Tina is swindled out of a beloved Equestranauts toy, Bob not only spends days memorizing every tidbit of Equestranauts errata that he can get his hands on in an effort to con the con man, he goes to a convention in a horse costume and even subjects himself to GETTING A TATTOO to get it back. When a rock and roll laser show he loved as a child is about to close forever, he moves Heaven and Earth to bring Gene with him to see it one last time, because he wants to share it with his son. And no matter how many pranks she pulls or ulcers she may cause him, it is evident in every episode just how much Louise adores her father – even if she’d never admit it.

On the Good Dad Scale of Victor to Bandit, Bob Belcher is about a 90. 

Frasier Crane, Cheers & Frasier & Frasier (again)

Kelsey Grammar’s Frasier Crane started out as a pretty good dad. After his son, Fredrick, was born, in the last few seasons of Cheers we see several episodes that show him as a loving and devoted father, even (and especially) after his wife leaves the two of them in the final season. Remember, abandonment is an automatic failing grade. But when he got his own spinoff, the tailored Italian loafers were on the other foot – Fredrick stays with his ex-wife in Boston, while Frasier moves across the country to Seattle. It was a practical decision for the producers of the show – they wanted to get the character as far away from any elements of Cheers as they could to allow the show to stand on its own. But in doing so, they made Frasier come across as a very absent father. Once or twice a season we’d get an episode where Freddy comes to visit his dad or Frasier goes back to Boston to visit Freddy, and in those episodes we usually see a loving relationship, but for the most part Frasier isn’t there.

In fairness, the character eventually recognizes his mistake, and in the Frasier reboot that hit a couple of years ago, after the death of his own father, Frasier moves BACK to Boston to live with Freddy, hoping to forge the bond that he neglected for far too long. It wasn’t a case of “too little, too late,” as Freddy does, in fact, show that he loves his father. But the new dynamic demonstrates so clearly that Frasier and Freddy don’t really understand each other that he simply can’t get a high score. 

On the Good Dad Scale of Victor to Bandit, Frasier Crane is about a 40. Ironically, by the end of the first Frasier run, his dad Marty had climbed up to about 75.

Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, Home Improvement

Tim Allen’s character on Home Improvement didn’t INVENT the trope of a bumbling husband and long-suffering wife, but I would argue that the two decades of adherence to it are in large part to the popularity of his show. Tim plays Tim, the host of a TV home improvement show obsessed with juicing up every gadget he can get his hands on in the quest for “more power.” He’s also the father of three young boys (who, over the course of the show, become three teenage boys). His efforts at parenthood are the main plot of around half the episodes and a B-plot in most of the others. 

Tim can be oblivious at times, often getting so caught up in whatever his current project is that he misses the obvious cues that people around him aren’t enjoying his tomfoolery. But I think it’s important to recognize that Tim never deliberately sets out to harm anyone. And in fact, the only person who usually gets hurt by his antics is Tim himself. What’s more, he genuinely enjoys spending time with his sons, although he can get frustrated when they don’t necessarily share his own interests (these stories are usually played out with his middle son, played by Jonathan Taylor Thomas) and has trouble connecting with the things they want that he doesn’t. But there can never be any doubt that Tim loves his boys, something he tries to make clear as his own father died when he was a child and he’s felt a gaping void his entire life. And whenever Tim realizes his mistakes (usually thanks to the wisdom of Wilson, the Neighbor Behind the Fence) he tries his best to make amends.

On the Good Dad Scale of Victor to Bandit, Tim Taylor is about a 65. He passes, just not with flying colors.

Peter Griffin, Family Guy

In the early days of Family Guy, Peter Griffin was kind of a less-loveable Homer Simpson. He was a dolt, he screwed up all the time, and he often behaved selfishly. But while Homer usually came around and realized his mistakes, genuinely loving his wife and kids, over the years Peter has doubled down on his stupidity, selfishness, and mean-spiritedness. He ignores his youngest child, leaving him to spend all his time with the dog, and Peter and – frankly – the entire rest of the family are frequently cruel and even abusive to his daughter, Meg. It’s an awful, toxic relationship, and despite an occasional episode that tries to show a bond between the members of the Griffin family, the formula of the show always drifts back to the fact that these are people who pretty much hate each other and would have no reason to associate with one another were they not related. 

On the Good Dad Scale of Victor to Bandit, Peter Griffin is a 10, and that’s the ONLY time you’ll ever call Peter called a ten. 

Jeff Morales, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Jeff is the father of Miles Morales, a teenage boy who becomes the new Spider-Man after the original dies in battle. He’s also a cop, and he’s also kind of a dork. And that’s one of the things that makes him a great father. Jeff’s establishing character moment comes early in Into the Spider-Verse, where he drops Miles off at school. He tells Miles that he loves him, but when Miles starts to leave without reply, Jeff blares his police siren and tells him over his loudspeaker, “You’ve gotta say I love you back.”

At first, it seems like a typical parent trying to embarrass his kid, but I always thought this scene was more important, more indicative than that. If you just want to embarrass your child, there are thousands of different ways to do it, and every dad on this list (even the good ones) has found his own unique spin on that concept. Jeff is playing his dad card to embarrass Miles a little, yes, but more importantly, he wants his son to know two things.

  1. He loves him.
  2. It’s okay to SAY it.

There are SO MANY dads – not just in fiction, but sadly, in real life – who seem to think those words are something to shy away from. That it’s somehow unmanly to express that emotion, that a “real” dad would NEVER say such a thing to his child, especially his son. What utter nonsense. If Peter Griffin’s dad had told him he loved him once in a while, maybe his own family wouldn’t be the human equivalent of a cesspool. 

Jeff wants Miles to know that he loves him and that he’s not ashamed to express it, and that’s a lesson that more dads in the world need to know. For that, if nothing else, he gets a very high score. On the Good Dad Scale of Victor to Bandit, Jeff Morales is an 85. 

Heinz Doofenshmirtz, Phineas and Ferb

Yes, I’m bringing up Phineas and Ferb. Yes, AGAIN.

Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz is a supervillain. He spends his days working on one invention after another in an effort to conquer or bring humiliation to those who he believes have wronged him. He is funded by an absurdly generous alimony agreement with his ex-wife, Charlene. He gets beaten up by a platypus every single day. 

And he loves his daughter, Vanessa, with such total devotion that you can’t possibly hate him.

Doof usually has some sort of preposterous backstory to explain his scheme of the day, and a great many of them deal with just how awful his own parents were. They made him stand out in the yard because they couldn’t afford a garden gnome. His father named the dog “Only Son.” When his mother’s second child turned out to be a boy, they made Heinz wear the girl’s clothes she had mistakenly made for an entire year, while showing blatant favoritism to the new kid, Roger. They abandoned him to be raised by ocelots. And even before any of these other indignities, NEITHER of his parents bothered to show up for his birth. 

Doof will be damned if he EVER allows his daughter to feel anything less than complete adoration from him. 

This isn’t to say that he’s the PERFECT dad, of course. He wants Vanessa to follow him into the family business, which is “Evil.” He’s overprotective and occasionally intrusive, such as when he pretended to be a teenager to accompany her on a campout. He spends YEARS trying to hunt down a toy she wanted as a child, never considering that as a teenager she may not actually want it anymore. When some dude on a motorcycle catcalls his daughter, he zaps him into another dimension. (Okay, that one actually should go in the plus column.) But everything he does is done with sincere love and a desire to give his daughter the happy childhood he never had, even recruiting his arch-nemesis Perry the Platypus to help throw Vanessa a birthday party. 

On the Good Dad Scale of Victor to Bandit, Heinz Doofenshmirtz is about an 80. He’s the most inept supervillain on the planet, but he just may be the greatest dad in the ENTIRE TRI-STATE AREA!!!

We could do this much longer, friends – there are countless other fictional dads we could bring up and debate and find their place on the scale, but I think I’ve gone through enough to make my point. Have a great Father’s Day, and make sure your own dad knows you’d put him at the top of the list. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. On his best days as a dad, he knows he’s not at Bandit standards, but if he can hit Dr. D, he feels like he’s done all right. 

Geek Punditry #110: Playing Favorites With Love Stories

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It’s been a while, but it’s time once again for Playing Favorites! Yes, Playing Favorites, that Geek Punditry mini feature in which I throw out a category and my pals on social media suggest related topics wherein we pick some of the best of the best. With Valentine’s Day looming, this week I asked people to share ideas for love story topics. So grab that special someone and let’s get to it! 

Bad Choices 

Jeff Edwards asked for love stories where it’s clear that the people involved made the wrong choice. It’s a funny idea, because I’m sure we can all think of at least one movie where we’ve walked away saying something like, “What the hell did he SEE in her?” And as far as I’m concerned the absolute apex of this trope is from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. 

No, I didn’t expect to be writing about Lord of the Rings this week either, but here we are. 

Now I love these movies. I think they are masterpieces, and I respect that Peter Jackson didn’t play all fast and loose with canon like SOME fantasy filmmakers I could mention. But if there’s one thing I simply will never understand, it’s why Aragorn would choose Arwen over Eowyn.

Seriously, why is this even a contest?

Sure, Liv Tyler is a classical beauty, but even 20 years ago I would have climbed over her and an entire briar patch to get to Miranda Otto. Nor is it just a matter of looks. Arwyn has that elvish grace and delicacy that makes you feel like you’re embracing a porcelain doll, and I don’t care for that. Eowyn is strong and brave, she killed the Witch King with the power of semantics, and I hear she’s doing her best to get better at making stew. She’s got it all.

In second place is a tie between every story ever written in which Archie Andrews chooses Veronica Lodge over Betty Cooper. I get it. Archie, Betty, and Veronica are the eternal love triangle, and we all know that there’s never going to be a TRUE resolution. They’ve had attempts over the years, but it never sticks. But there is a word that the French have for people who prefer Veronica over Betty: wrongo.

Frankly, they can both do better.

I don’t want this to sound like I hate Veronica, mind you. I think she gets a bit of a bad rap. There have been numerable stories that have shown that, underneath her rich girl veneer, she has a good heart. But that doesn’t change the fact that she’s spoiled and selfish, and that Archie is dazzled by her beauty. Betty, on the other hand, is entirely loyal and devoted to him, and loves him without reservation, whereas Veronica on many occasions has been known to toss him aside at a moment’s notice. In fact, that’s probably WHY Archie goes for Veronica – because she’s less attainable. 

What an incredibly stupid reason. What an incredibly realistic reason.

As if that weren’t enough, Archie ignores the very sensible advice of his friends. I’m not saying that if my friends hadn’t liked Erin when I starting dating her that I would have ended the relationship, but at the very least it would have made me question what was up. True friends, people who honestly have your back, should be listened to, and Jughead has made it ABUNDANTLY clear over the years that he’s Team Betty. Archie. Archibald. Listen to your bro.

It’s a little easier to justify when you remember that Archie and the gang are all, in fact, teenagers, and as such he is even more inclined to make incredibly stupid choices than we males of the biologically adult variety. The characters aren’t ever going to grow up, but if they DID, I would like to think that Archie’s better judgment would finally kick in and he would see that the girl next door is the way to go, hopefully before Betty finally comes to HER senses and dumps his ass for Adam Chisolm.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I DO feel ways about things. 

Finally, although this is not a hill that I personally am prepared to die on, my wife wishes me to share her sincere belief that, in West Side Story, Tony was an absolute idiot for going after Maria when Anita was, like, RIGHT THERE. This is true of both the original and the remake. This is even true of the older Rita Moreno IN the remake. I, on the other hand, just want to point out that West Side Story is a multiversal variant of Romeo and Juliet, and as such, pretty much everybody in that story makes nothing but bad choices all day and all night. 

Electric Love

My uncle Todd Petit asked for the best love story involving a robot or cyborg, which is extremely specific, but that’s cool with me! I was a little hesitant to pick this one, though, mostly because in the Facebook comments several people already went straight to what I think is probably the best robot love story of all time.

Project ALF. 

Ah, I’ve missed this stupid, stupid joke.

No, wait, I’m thinking of the best alien/feline love stories. Obviously, the best love story involving robots comes from the Pixar masterpiece WALL-E. I love this movie, and I assume pretty much everybody who has a soul also loves it, and perhaps the main reason is the deep, perfect, sincere love that is expressed in this film. WALL-E is a garbage robot; his job for centuries has been just to collect trash and compact it. There’s no emotional component to this. But after all these hundreds of years of solitude, he finds himself growing a personality – likes, dislikes, hobbies. He begins saving select items from the trash that he finds interesting and grows a little collection. He makes friends with a cockroach. He is mesmerized by the movie Hello, Dolly! 

He even gave her flowers.

And then he meets EVE, a robot that is searching the dead Earth for signs that life can return, and it’s instant sparks. It’s like watching a busted down Ford Pinto fall in love with a sleek new electric hybrid vehicle (coming this fall in Cars 4!) but it WORKS. At first, EVE isn’t particularly impressed by WALL-E, but his sweetness, kindness, and courage melt her electronic heart. And perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that their entire relationship is almost completely wordless. Neither of them have any dialogue other than occasionally saying their names, but that doesn’t matter. By the end of this movie you are crying and cheering and imagining a new Earth populated by a slendering human population and all of WALL-E and EVE’s little robot babies.

That said, good on Pixar for resisting the urge to name him ADD-M. 

As for other great robot love stories…well, the one that comes most clearly to mind is actually one of the most tragic, and it’s from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Like most Star Trek shows in the pre-modern era, this show changed and evolved considerably over its first few seasons. Perhaps the most visible change (other than Riker’s beard) was the departure of Denise Crosby, who played security chief Tasha Yar in season one. Crosby asked to be written out of the show, frustrated over the lack of attention and development her character was getting, and honestly, you can’t blame her. Go back and watch that first season again and you’ll see most of the writing did her no favors at all. But there is ONE element of her abbreviated story that stuck with the characters for all time, and that was her relationship with the android Data. The idea of Data is that he is a Pinocchio, a robot that looks almost human and that wants to be a real boy, if only he knew what emotions were.

She had an AI boyfriend BEFORE it was cool.

Data is my favorite Next Generation character, and in my top three of all Star Trek characters, and the reason is because of his emotional journey. The conceit was that, as an android, he desired the emotions he did not have, but even in that description you can see the contradiction. DESIRE is an emotion. If you HAVE no emotions, how can you DESIRE them? My read on Data, the way I feel about the character, is that he truly DID have emotions from the very beginning – he simply didn’t understand them, know how to process them, know how to define them, and therefore he BELIEVED he had none. After Tasha Yar is killed off, Data returns to her in his thoughts many times. For six seasons, then again 30 years later in the final season of Star Trek: Picard, it is Data that recalls Tasha more than anybody else, Data who brings her up, Data who reveals in that Picard episode that his memories of her are a core component of his personality matrix. The great legacy of Tasha Yar is the fact that, for the rest of his existence, poor Data has been mourning a woman he didn’t really understand he was in love with. 

Sitcom Love

Rachel Ricks asks what I think is the best romance from a sitcom. That’s such a tricky one. There are a lot of great sitcom COUPLES – Bob and Linda Belcher, Herman and Lily Munster, and so forth – but if it’s a pairing that was already together when the show begins, I don’t think I can count them. To count it as a romance, I think we need to see the relationship blossom INTO love.

I also don’t really count those stories that end poorly or where the characters don’t really belong together. Sam and Diane on Cheers may be one of the all-time legendary sitcom couples, but they were utterly toxic to one another and never belonged together. Not to say that a love story HAS to have a happy ending (see what I said about Data), but if it’s a sitcom, I want something a bit more lighthearted.

So I’m gonna stick to the Cheersiverse and say one of my favorite sitcom romances is Niles and Daphne from Frasier. And it’s odd, because it started off as a pretty poor depiction of a relationship – when they meet, Niles is already married (to an utterly reprehensible woman who browbeats and emasculates him at every turn) and pines for Daphne in secret for years. She, meanwhile, is completely oblivious to his affection and treats him with the same love and care that she does Eddie the dog. Eventually, though, his marriage to Maris ends and the two of them find one another. The arc where they’re both with other people but wind up boomeranging into each other’s arms is one of my favorites, and from that point onward the love and affection between them elevates both characters.

Pictured: Steam Heat

There’s a relatively early episode where they have to pretend to be a couple as one of the screwball schemes that happened in every other episode of Frasier, and they play the part so convincingly that Niles almost believes she shares his affection until she compliments him on how good an actor he is. The heartbreak David Hyde Pierce conveys is palpable, and you die a little for him. But it’s bought back years later, when they get together and revisit that scene again, bringing it all full circle. I just love watching those two. 

I also simply adore the relationship between Eleanor and Chidi on The Good Place. This show, about a self-proclaimed “Arizona dirtbag” (played in an adorable way that only Kristen Bell could have pulled off) who goes to Heaven due to what amounts to a clerical error, is one of the smartest and most emotionally profound sitcoms of the past decade, if not of all time. The relationship that develops between Eleanor and Chidi (William Jackson Harper) is one of the core elements of what makes it such a magnificent show. Eleanor has spent her life being self-centered and scuzzy, whereas Chidi’s life has been one of anxiety and apprehension. Eleanor acts without thinking, Chidi overthinks EVERYTHING to the point of catastrophe. The way each of them makes the other a better person is beautiful and heartwarming. 

If this screenshot doesn’t make you want to cry, you did NOT watch the last episode.

There’s a lot more to The Good Place than I revealed in that little recap, because if you’ve never seen the show I don’t want to spoil any of the incredible twists and surprises that it includes, but go and watch it and tell me you’re not rooting for Eleanor and Chidi every step of the way.

Okay, folks, I think that’s going to bring us to the end of part one of “Playing Favorites With Love Stories.” There are still several great suggestions for topics, though, so I’m not done yet. Come back next Friday, Valentine’s Day, for part two. And until then, hey, share this with someone you love. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He maintains that the purest love story on TV is Gomez and Morticia Addams, but nobody asked about that, so he’s gonna drop it here. 

Geek Punditry #102: Making a Merrython

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When the holidays roll around, one thing you can be certain of is that I’ll be queuing up all of the great Christmas movies and specials. And I don’t just mean the obvious ones like It’s a Wonderful Life, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the Rankin/Bass catalogue, or the legendary yuletide adventures of Garfield and Charlie Brown. I also have a great affection for Christmas episodes of old TV shows. As I’ve written before, there was a time when I would get home from school and watch reruns of old sitcoms for hours on end, allowing me to have a far greater memory of the contents of said television programs than I ever will less pertinent information, such as my wife’s telephone number. 

In this age of streaming, it seems like it would be simplicity itself to cultivate a massive playlist of holiday-themed episodes to start your own Christmas marathon…but alas, that does not seem to be the case. Although most streaming services have a “holiday” category, none of them seem to have what I really want, namely an option to just create my own playlist of episodes and set it to run on shuffle. I want an easily-curated selection of shows for a Yuletide Marathon – a Merrython, if you will. 

But if Netflix, Hulu, and Paramount Plus won’t let me do it, damn them, I’ll do it myself. Plex is a great system, an app that I can use to arrange and watch all of the movies and TV shows I’ve got saved on my own server, complete with my own cultivated playlists and a shuffle option. Now the catch here is that you actually have to provide the video yourself, which obviously limits things a little bit…but I started collecting DVDs almost a quarter of a century ago. I’ve got a LOT of TV shows on disc, and I’ve got lots of compilation DVDs of Christmas episodes from assorted TV series that I can throw into the mix as well.

While I certainly encourage everybody to create their own playlists, today I’m going to share with you a part of MINE. Here are just a few of my favorite Christmas-themed episodes of my favorite sitcoms, many of them episodes that are sitting in my Plex queue waiting to be watched. On Plex I set the playlist to shuffle, so I never know what’s coming up next…but for you guys, I’ll put them in chronological order.

The Honeymooners: “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Season 1, episode 13, original air date Dec. 24, 1955.

My love for The Honeymooners knows no bounds. The only sitcom duo better than the pairing of Jackie Gleason and Art Carney is the pairing of Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows. Ralph Kramden’s antics with both his best friend and his wife are legendary, and have become part of the DNA of television comedy. While I can’t be certain that the Kramdens are the FIRST example of a sitcom schlub married to a woman who’s way out of his league, it’s definitely the trope codifier.

This legendary episode sees Ralph struggling to get a present for his wife, Alice, on the day before Christmas. Ralph is berating himself for having previously squandered money that he could have used to get her something nice on a bowling ball for himself (and before anybody says “Simpsons did it!” I must remind you that this show was some three decades before the adventures of Homer and Marge). As is always the case, Ralph ropes his sidekick Ed Norton into a variety of short-lived schemes to try to get the money or get a present for Alice, each of which is thwarted in a delightfully goofy fashion. In the end, the story works out to a sort of one-sided but utterly heartfelt variation of “The Gift of the Magi,” one that I never get tired of watching this time of year. Audrey Meadows was an absolute treasure, and this episode shows that as well as any.

I Love Lucy: “The I Love Lucy Christmas Show.” Season 6, episode 27, original air date Dec. 24, 1956

In this episode, the Ricardos and Mertzes are spending Christmas Eve together, struggling with decorating the tree and talking about how wonderful it was to have a child – Little Ricky – with whom to celebrate the holidays. I’ve mentioned before what an innovative show I Love Lucy was, on top of just being one of the funniest shows in television history, but this episode in particular has some historical significance. When Lucille Ball was pregnant in real life, they incorporated her pregnancy into the show. Those episodes proved to be overwhelmingly popular, and they wanted to milk a little of that juice again, so they used this episode to showcase the characters remembering the adventures they had surrounding Little Ricky’s birth. You see, not only did Lucy and Desi invent the rerun, but this Christmas episode marks the first clip show in television history.

These days, a lot of people consider clip shows tedious and wasteful, a cheap way to squeeze out an extra episode without spending a lot of money actually filming it, and in this day of shorter seasons the practice is almost extinct. But seventy years ago it was a chance for people to re-watch segments they loved, because there was no other option.

The show didn’t only recycle the clips, though, but also a gag at the end when all four adults (Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethel) each independently decide to dress as Santa Claus to surprise Little Ricky. They wind up getting into a slapstick chase in the living room, during which a fifth Santa appears. As they remove each other’s beards trying to determine who is who, the superfluous St. Nick grins and vanishes before their eyes. They had first used this gag at the end of a season one episode, “Drafted,” in a tag that had nothing to do with the episode itself, and had shown it again in subsequent Christmases. This “remake” made a lot more sense, given the episode it was used to conclude. 

Cheers: “The Spy Who Came in For a Cold One.” Season 1, Episode 12, original air date Dec. 16, 1982.

Cheers did a few Christmas episodes over its 11-year run, but none of them cling to my mind better than this one from the first season. This was, of course, a period where the show was still kind of trying to find its identity. It was still predominantly a romantic comedy, focusing on Sam and Diane’s relationship, but even at this point the ensemble piece it would eventually become was starting to shine through.

In this episode, a stranger shows up for a drink at the bar around Christmas and “accidentally” lets it slip to the patrons that he is – drumroll please – a spy. Diane, ever the pragmatist, meets his claim with the expected skepticism, but most of the rest of the gang plays along with it, plying the stranger for stories of his exciting lifestyle. When Diane finds a way to trap the spy in his own web, everything blows up in her face.

Aside from the date and the decorations, this isn’t an especially Christmasy story. We don’t get the usual “very valuable lesson” that so many of these episodes come with, nor is there a heartwarming moment at the end where everybody gets together for a group hug and reminds one another that friends are the real family. But I like the way it hammers down the dynamics of the group, how Diane gets a somewhat needed comeuppance about being too smart for her own good, and how it deftly establishes some of the tone and tropes that would follow the series further down the line, even after Shelley Long left the show. 

The Golden Girls: “Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas.” Season 2, episode 11, original air date Dec. 20, 1986.

It’s Christmas in Miami, and the girls are all making plans to jet off to visit their respective families in other parts of the country. Things get derailed, however, when a man dressed as Santa Claus shows up at Rose’s grief counseling center and starts taking hostages.

Hopefully, by this point, nobody needs me to tell them what a brilliant show Golden Girls was. You had a cast of four outrageously talented comedic actresses and a team of writers who were willing to push the envelope in ways that few other shows in the 1980s took a chance doing, and it has legitimately become recognized as one of the greatest TV comedies ever made. The amazing thing about this particular episode is the way it breaks down the story into three segments, any of which would have been an entire episode of a lesser sitcom. It starts with a funny scene showing the gift exchange between the girls before they leave for the holidays, which itself is ripe with comedic potential. Then we crash into the hostage situation, which seems like it would be the whole episode on its own until Sophia casually takes the gun away from the hostage-taker and berates Dorothy for not being able to tell the difference between a real gun and a fake. The final act shows the girls – now stranded in Miami and unable to make their flights – having a Christmas Eve dinner in a diner where they slowly come to the realization that they haven’t missed out on a Christmas with family after all.

This episode wraps up with some of the schmaltz that the Cheers episode was missing, and it’s just lovely. It was only the second season of the show, and while the bond between the characters was evident, this was the episode that kind of cemented how deeply the four of them all cared about one another, which (despite any friction on the set in real-life) was truly the core of the show. And of course, typical of the Golden Girls, the drippy, gooey sentiment at the end is nicely undercut by a joke from Sophia, who is one of the greatest characters in television history.  

ALF: “ALF’s Special Christmas.” Season 2, episodes 12 & 13 (two-part episode), original air date Dec. 14, 1987

Ah, is there anything that says “TV in the 80s” better than the adventures of a Muppet-esque alien living with a typical American family to the delight of audiences everywhere and – apparently – to the eternal disdain of the cast that had to work with him? From all accounts, the set of ALF was not a pleasant place to be, but this show was a favorite of mine as a kid, and I’m still on a quest to complete my run of the Marvel ALF comic books (50 regular issues, three annuals, two Christmas specials, a “spring” special, and two digests). It’s an oddly formative part of my personality.

In this two-part episode, the family leaves the Tanner home for a trip into the woods for Christmas. Willie rents a cabin for the family to stay in where ALF will be free from prying eyes, but as tends to happen, the little furball gets lost, winding up in a hospital where he’s mistaken for a doll and given to a child with a serious illness. He befriends the girl and eventually leaves, but the memory of her clings to him. Meanwhile, the Tanners find out that the man they’re renting the cabin from is giving it to them – two weeks after the death of his wife, he seems to be divesting himself of a lot of things…

This is honestly a pretty dark episode, even for a show like ALF, which frequently mixed a little darkness into its humor. (Cat buffet, anybody?) The two plotlines are about a child with a terminal illness and an old man contemplating suicide – fun for the whole family, right? But the whole thing is done with the typical ALF touch. There’s some goofy humor in it, and a dose of heart that makes the darkness a bit more bearable…and honestly, I think that’s kind of the point. The show doesn’t turn a blind eye to the bad things in the world, but does its best to show how to cope with them. That’s something I’ve always appreciated about it.

Frasier: “Frasier Grinch.” Season 3, episode 9, original air date Dec. 19, 1995

Let’s wing our way back to the Cheers Universe for this third-season episode of its successful spinoff show. The original Frasier was a brilliant series and arguably the most successful comedy spinoff of all time, but there was one thing about the adventures of Frasier Crane in Seattle that always kinda bugged me: the distance from his son. When the producers decided to give Kesley Grammar a spinoff they shipped him off to the other side of the country to do their best to resist the urge to have cameos from his former co-stars every other week, but the side effect here was that Frasier often came off as a very absentee father…ironic, as one of the best parts of this show was watching as Frasier rekindled his relationship with his own father, Martin. In this episode, Fraiser’s son Freddy is coming to Seattle to spend the holidays with his dad, and Frasier decides to shower the boy with the very thing every kid wants for Christmas: educational toys! It’s not long before Frasier realizes the enormity of his error and has to venture out to find the gifts Freddy REALLY wants for Christmas.

Like Diane in the parent show, the intelligentsia in the Crane family occasionally needed a reminder that they were not always the smartest ones in the room. This episode does a lot to help Frasier seem like a well-meaning father willing to go to great lengths to give his child a Merry Christmas (the least he could do, as he only sees the kid in one or two episodes a season). It also has some really great stuff with Martin, nailing the dynamic between Kelsey Grammar and John Mahoney. Frasier did many more Christmas episodes than Cheers, but this is my favorite.

Community: “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.” Season 2, episode 11, original air date Dec. 9, 2010.

By the second season of Community, the show had firmly embraced its role of commenting on and parodying the various tropes of sitcoms, and in this episode they went one step further by parodying classic Christmas specials. The entire episode is done in stop motion animation, mimicking the old Rankin/Bass “Animagic” style, as Abed is somehow stuck seeing the world as a holiday special. With the help of Professor Duncan, Abed’s study group tries to get to the bottom of his delusion and help him see the world the way that it really is.

This is not the first sitcom to try an animated special for the holidays – Home Improvement had a memorable episode that had a segment in stop motion animation, for example. But what elevates Community is that the episode does not ONLY parody Christmas specials, but also makes a real commentary on the characters. Despite his delusions, we learn things in this episode about Abed and his family that leave deep fingerprints on the character and make him a little more understandable than he may have been in the past. The episode has one of the most bizarre explanations for “the meaning of Christmas” that I’ve ever heard, but damned if it isn’t just perfect for this show. 

Abbott Elementary: “Holiday Hookah.” Season 2, episode 10, original air date Dec. 7, 2022.

The newest entry on my Christmas playlist comes from what I maintain is the best live-action comedy currently on television, ABC’s Abbott Elementary. After the last day of school before the winter break, young teachers Janine and Gregory (who have had your classic “will they/won’t they” thing happening for some time now) happen to run into each other at a hookah bar, each with a group of friends. Even if you’ve never seen an episode of this particular series, if you’ve watched other shows that use the same trope (see about a billion other shows) you’ll see the trajectory that this plotline is taking. There’s awkwardness, obvious attraction, confusion, and a reluctance to hook up with somebody you work with. It’s all done well, but is kind of standard stuff.

What I really like about this episode is actually the B-plot. Two of the older veteran teachers, Barbara and Melissa, have a tradition of having a Christmas dinner together after the end of the fall term each year. This year Jacob – a young teacher who fancies himself to be far cooler than he actually is – finds out about their celebration and winds up crashing their “Christmas Lounge.” The interaction between these three is wildly funny, and the relationship between Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter) has become a core pillar of the show at this point. Although the two are almost diametrically opposites of one another, personality-wise, their shared experience and long relationship has them stand out as the best of friends. It’s one of the sweeter, most realistic elements of the show (I can name several pairs of teachers I know in real life that remind me very much of these two), and I think this episode showcases that extremely well.

We also get your usual “somebody has to learn a lesson” moments that frequently accompany any Christmas episode, and as befits this series, they come from unlikely sources. Ava – the crazy principal who often seems wholly unsuited for her job – comes to Janine’s rescue, while Jacob gets his head screwed on straight thanks to the timely intervention of conspiracy nut custodian Mr. Johnson. All of it together makes for a fine Christmas viewing. 

There you have it, friends, some sitcom classics to get you in the Christmas mood this year. This is, of course, not to be considered a comprehensive list. There are hundreds of shows that have done Christmas episodes, and creating a truly complete list is probably beyond my abilities as a humble Geek Pundit. Which is why I invite you to share some of your favorites here in the comments, or on whatever social media you followed to get here! What are some of the all-time great Christmas episodes that have made it to YOUR Merrython playlist?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He didn’t even get to Laverne and Shirley, The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, The Beverly Hillbillies, Friends, Family Ties, Night Court, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers, Mama’s Family, Seinfeld, The Office, or The Big Bang Theory. Maybe there needs to be a sequel to this column next year. 

Geek Punditry #63: The TV Land Pet Sematary

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , ,

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new season of Night Court airing right now. Now that may surprise you if you, like most of us, remember the show going off the air back in 1992. But it may be slightly less shocking if I tell you that the new series, like approximately 75 percent of television these days, is a reboot.

Criminal Court Part 2, Part 2.

We live in the age of reboots on TV, and I think there are few obvious reasons for that. First of all, the people who fell in love with shows like Night Court during their formative years in the 80s and 90s are now largely the ones calling the shots at the networks, contributing greatly to the already-cyclical nature of pop culture. If you loved something once, it’s not unnatural or unusual to want to reclaim it and bring it back again, so when that kid who grew up watching DuckTales was given a shot at pitching an animated series to Disney, you damned well better believe he was gonna pitch a new DuckTales. 

The other reason, of course, is that the TV world in utter chaos as ratings for broadcast television drop like Wile E. Coyote strapped to an anvil and nobody knows how to interpret what little data we get from streaming services. It’s considered a safer bet to hitch your star to an older series that might bring its older audience along for the ride. It’s why we got shows like The Connors, Fuller House, Girl Meets World, Quantum Leap, Animaniacs, Raven’s Home, One Day at a Time, And Just Like That, and, for the kiddos from the aughts, iCarly. It’s why every couple of months somebody floats the idea of a new version of The Office and why Bryan Cranston likes to tease us to say he’d totally be down to resurrect Malcolm in the Middle. Reboots are here and they’re not going anywhere. It’s like all these old shows were buried in the TV Land Pet Sematary, and sometimes they come back VERY wrong.

More shambling corpses than 10 season of The Walking Dead.

The truth is, like any other wave in entertainment, there are good and bad attempts, and I think one of the things that contributes to how well a reboot is accepted is the adherence to the original. It’s bizarre how often a studio will bring back an old show and then change everything about it, sometimes resulting in something as appalling as Thundercats Go! (the Gage Creed of the TV Land Pet Sematary). The logic of the producers is usually something along the lines of “We’re trying to get new fans, not old ones.” My response to this is, “if you’re not trying to get the old fans, why the hell did you call the show Walker: Texas Ranger?” 

One of the most interesting examples of both a failed AND a successful reboot is Star Trek: Picard. When the first season was launched, the idea was to focus solely on Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard character, with only sparse appearances from some of his old castmates. They didn’t want to just make season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The problem, of course, was that the fans just wanted season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So after two seasons of – I’m going to be kind here – dubious quality, for the third and final season they threw away most of the elements that weren’t working, got the crew of the Enterprise-D on the phone, and made one of the most entertaining and warmly-regarded seasons of TV in Trek History.

I’m never gonna get tired of this picture.

But back to Night Court. The new series is set in the same courtroom as the original, and it is a continuation rather than a full continuity restart such as Charmed, which I for one prefer. The head of the new ensemble is Melissa Rauch (of The Big Bang Theory) as Judge Abby Stone, daughter of the character played by the late Harry Anderson in the old series. While many of these reboots make an effort to have a cast that frequently blends the old and the new, there isn’t a ton of cross-pollination in Criminal Court Part Two, and for a fair enough reason: most of the original cast is no longer with us. Night Court, tragically, has suffered a far greater attrition rate than most other shows of the 80s. Of the entire original main cast, only three of them were still alive when the reboot was announced, and one of them (the great Richard Moll, who played Bull Shannon) passed away after season one without ever agreeing to make an appearance. Marsha Warfield, touchingly, has made two appearances, and Brent Spiner (who played a recurring character for a few years on the original) has shown up as well, but fans looking for familiar faces will be disappointed. 

The only original cast member that’s a regular on the new version is John Larroquette, whose Dan Fielding is almost unrecognizable as the same character. 80s Dan was sleazy, lascivious, and somebody that wouldn’t last ten minutes in a modern courthouse without getting “Me Too”ed into oblivion, which is probably the reason for the drastic change. Modern Dan is old, curmudgeonly, a combination of Oscar the Grouch and Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace. I’m not saying that I need a sleazeball character for a show to be enjoyable, but considering how it was his defining characteristic, it seems ridiculous that his bed-jumping past is almost completely ignored in favor of this somewhat lonely man that Dan has become. I don’t even mind that he’s changed, I just wish there was a clearer path of transition, because they don’t talk about his past at all. He’s mentioned the death of his wife, which is implied to have triggered this change in his personality, but HELL, that’s a story I want to know! Tell me about the woman who changed Dan!

I just want someone to make this make sense.

The show isn’t quite as wacky as the original either. Oh sure, the classic series didn’t start wacky, but it spun wildly out of control and by the final season it was practically a live-action cartoon. In fact, in one memorable episode, a defendant in a one-scene gag turned out to be the fully-animated and aforementioned Wile E. Coyote. The reboot occasionally makes a flailing grab at bringing that sensibility back, but it usually feels forced. So far the most authentic thing about the series is ditching the actor playing the Court Clerk and replacing him between the first two seasons. 

Anyway, the new Night Court is okay. It’s not great, it’s okay, and that’s how I feel about most of the reboots that I’ve watched. Fuller House drew most of its charm by reminding the viewers about the cheese of the original series. The Animaniacs relaunch gave me a few laughs, but there was nothing that came even close to the genius of the Anvilania episode of the classic.

And then there’s Frasier.

The show that gave the world tossed salads and scrambled eggs.

I’ve written before of my love for Cheers and how I consider it one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, and that love extends to its spinoff. In fact, I would say that Frasier and Better Call Saul belong on a special shelf labeled “spinoffs as good as and sometimes even better than the original.” It is a very, very exclusive club. Laverne and Shirley keeps petitioning for admission but is denied on the grounds of the Cindy Williams-less last season. And because I loved Frasier so damned much, I was wary of the reboot when the first season dropped last fall. I finally worked myself up to give it a watch and…

…be surprised by this…

…it’s okay.

Let me tell you a little bit about the new set-up. In the original Frasier, Kelsey Grammer’s character from Cheers moved from Boston to Seattle where his father Martin (John Mahoney) wound up moving in with him. Frasier, of course, was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist with more than a little bit of pretension, whereas his father was a retired cop who liked beer and basketball. The Odd Couple style dynamic between them provided a lot of the fuel for what was one of the greatest comedies in television history (and that’s not even bringing up the brilliance of the rest of the cast). In the reboot, Frasier moves back to Boston and moves in with his son, Frederick (played by Jack Cutmore-Scott) who has inherited both his father’s intelligence and his grandfather’s working-class sensibilities. The original show gave us a long and rewarding arc of Frasier and Martin reconnecting and forging a sincere and touching bond. In perhaps the reboot’s most interesting twist, Frasier deliberately moves in with his son in an attempt to recreate this father/son bond following Martin’s death. 

“I’m confused. Which one of them is supposed to be the new Chopper Dave?”

Cutmore-Scott and Grammer work well together, mirroring the Frasier/Martin dynamic but reversing the archetypes of the characters. The rest of the cast, though, isn’t as engaging, and I don’t think there’s anybody who watches the reboot who isn’t waiting for Niles and Daphne to show up. Obviously the late John Mahoney can’t make an appearance, but his specter hangs over the first season of the reboot and it makes for one of the most authentic elements of the show. It’s telling, though, that the two best episodes of the first season are the ones that guest-starred Bebe Neuwirth (as Frasier’s ex-wife and Freddy’s mom Lilith) and Peri Gilpin (as Frasier’s old radio producer Roz Doyle). Supposedly David Hyde Pierce and Jane Leeves, who played Niles and Daphne in the old show, were approached to appear in the reboot but declined. I’ve probably heard a half dozen explanations for why they turned the offer down, and since I have no idea which if any of them is correct, I’m not going to speculate or point fingers. All I’m going to say is the show has a much better chance of getting a season three if they find a way to get Pierce and Leeves to show up in season two.

If you’re going to bring back something from the past, you need to keep in mind what people loved about it in the first place. That doesn’t mean it needs to be exactly the same. In many cases – be it because of changing societal values or the loss of beloved performers – it can’t be. But if you don’t at least identify the spirit of the original and do your best to bring it back in the reboot, then what the hell is the point?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s waiting with baited breath for the reboot of Mama’s Family now that Vicki Lawrence is actually age-appropriate to play Mama.