It’s been a month since I reviewed The Michael J. Fox Show, so I figured I would look at it with fresh eyes. While reviewing the show is no longer the bane of my existence, I didn’t come out of The Michael J. Fox Show’s Thanksgiving episode finding it remotely interesting.
Is it possible to write a Thanksgiving episode without tired old television clichés? Not for the writers of The Michael J. Fox Show. To be honest, the episode didn’t start out too bad, even if we have seen the premise a million times before.
In this episode, Annie decides that it’s time to have Thanksgiving in her and Mike’s Manhattan apartment. Since the Henry’s Thanksgiving is usually celebrated at Mike and his sister Leigh’s parents’ house, the elder Henrys are invited. This is where things take a wacky turn. Get it? It’s a sitcom!
It turns out Leigh told her parents, Steve and Beth, she moved to Portland because she doesn’t want to have to see them. Obviously, Steve and Beth don’t know that their daughter has been living with her brother and his wife. Leigh really doesn’t want to see her parents, so she tries to catch a flight out of New York, but as she was leaving Steve and Beth had just arrived. Instead of spending Thanksgiving in Atlanta, Leigh has to pretend she’s visiting and wanted to surprise them.
Leigh has a good reason to avoid her mother. Beth is so hypercritical that she makes Marie Barone look like June Cleaver. This is a woman who gave her daughter a weightloss book and wrinkle cream, even though her daughter isn’t fat and looks fine. Beth goes so far that everyone realizes she “broke” Annie. She also doesn’t let Annie make the Thanksgiving dinner as planned because she finds fresh cranberry sauce to be weird, which Eve says too.
That incident leads Eve and Harris to search New York City for cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving Day. After searching every supermarket in town, Eve and Harris take canned cranberry sauce from a church donation bin. A priest catches them, but accepts a 300-dollar donation to keep quite. It’s a scene that wouldn’t seem out of place on Friends, if Eve was Rachel and Harris was Joey.
While Beth is breaking Annie and Eve and Harris are looking for cranberry sauce, Mike, Steve, Ian, and Graham play football in Central Park, which Annie didn’t want them to do because Steve always goes to hard on Mike. The reason for this is that Steve never wants to underestimate his son. However, this creates a problem because Steve and Mike both have health issues, angina and Parkinson’s, respectively, that require them to limit strenuous activity. As a result of pushing his body two far, Steve gets chest pains, which means that Steve has a heart to heart with his son about, well, his heart problems.
The Michael J. Fox Show would be better without the ham-fisted attempts to give it heart, which is made worse by the terrible acting. All the characters seem fake, especially Eve, who goes back and for between being a pseudo-intelligent commentary on teenage hormones and a typical whiny teenage girl, who overestimates her own importance. It’s a shame that Betsey Brandt and Michael J. Fox got sucked into this show because their talents could have been used better elsewhere.
I am the editor and founder of “Wait! What’s a Dial?”. I recently graduated from Rowan University with degrees in both Radio/TV/Film and Journalism. My passions are classic and British television, especially when those two are combined.