Like numbers 18 and 19 on this list, today’s Christmas episode does not end on the warm and fuzzy, light-the-fire-and-fill-the-eggnog note that we expect out of holiday television programs.  But then, a Twilight Zone episode ending on the happy would be even more frightening than usual. 

“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is a twisted homage to Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.  Anyone recognizing the allusion to Pirandello’s play from the episode title will anticipate a blurring of the line between the real and unreal.  In “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” that line is between human and the human representations – dolls.  In this case the dolls believe they are human and are trapped in a metal container.  They don’t remember or know much about their lives pre-container.  They spend most of the episode attempting both self-discovery and escape.  The “reality” of their situation is revealed in the final moments of the episode.

Six Characters in Search of an Author ends in the characters’ stories being written tragically.  There is a parallel in “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” as the episode’s author, Rod Serling, writes an ending for the trapped Major, clown, hobo, ballerina, and bagpiper in which their lives are realized in the episode’s narrative, but they are not the lives the characters imagined for themselves.  Like Six Characters, however, the real “lives” created for the Major, clown, etc., while tragic, provide pleasure for outside beneficiaries.  In Six Characters, it is the audience watching the play.  In “Five Characters,” it is the children who will receive the dolls as a result of Christmas charity.  With both texts, we resist the urge to feel good about endings which create joy for all but the characters themselves. 

If you watch “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” and I hope you do, you might also find some similarity to another story, the much less serious Toy Story.  Toys are such an important part of Christmas, and bringing them to life in stories of determination and survival fit well the holiday theme of hope – with the Twilight Zone Christmas episode, that hope is just too temporary.

Christmas has finally interfered with my Christmas episode list!  In an effort to catch up today, I’m combining two episodes that are actually a two-part episode series, and I’m calling them two blog entries. 

The sixth season of The X-Files is full of tidbits of answers to some of the mysteries the program built not only concerning the paranormal and alien, but about the connection of lead characters Mulder and Scully to those mysteries.  In the two-episode holiday offering of 1997, “Christmas Carol” and “Emily,” some of the secrets of Scully’s earlier abduction are revealed.  For the audience, the episodes offer new evidence that Scully is evolving from scientist skeptic to believer, the character’s primary character arc.

Set during a Christmas visit to her brother’s home, one of the highlights of the episode are flashbacks to Scully’s childhood that explain some of her adult personality traits and motivations.  Gillian Anderson’s fourteen year old daughter, Zoe, plays the 1976 version of Scully.  Another special element of the episode for me is the role of a small gold cross necklace that links Sully’s past to the present situation of locating the child born from the experiments conducted on her during her abduction.

As much as I think Christmas Carol retellings are overdone, something I’ve noted on this blog list before, The X-Files presented us with a Christmas Carol episode we might not have noticed if not for the title.  This is because Scully’s ghost of Christmas past is not some Scrooge, but her own young self, a truly unique borrowing from the Dickens’ classic.

While the end of “Emily” does not leave us wanting to break out the eggnog in celebration, its poignant final moments do leave us knowing more about Dana Scully, who we have spent six seasons cheering on, hoping that she will open her heart and her mind to the possibilities that only belief, not science, can provide.  As such, “Christmas Carol” and “Emily” are indeed holiday gifts for viewers.   

Today’s entry is not about an existing television episode; the show I’m writing about today doesn’t air until tomorrow.  And it’s not about Christmas; it is actually about the end of Ramadan.  In the spirit of Christmas and “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men,” I’m going to write about TLC’s All American Muslim.

All American Muslim is not the best program to ever air on TLC, but neither is it the worst.  It is a tastefully produced and interesting show that lets viewers get to know some of their neighbors in Dearborn, Michigan.  Those neighbors just happen to be Muslim, which has created quite a pretty tasteless stir.

The episode airing tomorrow, Sunday, December 18, is about football.  “A Chance at Redemption” looks at how the high school football team is doing post Ramadan, during which they practiced through the night to avoid breaking the fast, is about as All-American as it gets.  I would speculate that football is the biggest religion in America.  While Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus and Jews celebrate the miracle of the oil and African Americans celebrate Kwanzaa and Muslims celebrate Ramadan, Americans celebrate football.  It is part of our national Thanksgiving, and it is part of our Christmas day activities, right there between seeing what Santa delivered to good boys and girls and the large Christmas feast.  And we cap of our holiday season by watching two college football teams fight it out for number 1 status in early January.

The title for this week’s episode is ironic, especially in light of the advertising controversy surrounding All American Muslim the past few weeks.  Bowing to pressure from the Florida Family Association, which argued the show is "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values," both Lowe’s and Kayak.com have removed their advertising from the show.  While the subjects of All American Muslim have no connection to the agenda the FFA contends, and indeed in other episodes have grieved along with their fellow Americans for the tragic losses of 9/11, those Christians who believe these claims, the FFA, have forsaken the greatest of all Christian qualities, forgiveness.  For a faith based on the idea of redemption, there is little room for it in the un-neighborly, unloving, unforgiving agenda of the FFA. 

Just as it would be unreasonable to charge that 20 Kids and Counting, which focuses on an almost village-sized conservative Christian family in Arkansas, is propaganda that hides the agenda behind radical Christianity’s “clear and present danger to American liberties,” an agenda that has manifested itself in senseless violence against those of other faiths and ideas (think abortion clinic bombings), it is unreasonable to make the claim about this American Muslim community.  The most simple logical fallacy I teach is the hasty generalization, but sadly it is the one for which I can provide the most examples for my students.  The FFA’s charges against All American Muslim will give me yet another example.

While my boycott of Lowe’s for bowing to the hasty generalizations of the FFA is unlikely to produce any pain in their pocketbook, I’m hoping that my watching “A Chance at Redemption” tomorrow will at least make them rethink their corporate decision making.  If all of us watch tomorrow night’s episode, the numbers might just convince Lowe’s to ask for their own chance at redemption.

Today will be double entry day.  My day was so consumed with holiday baking yesterday that I failed to attend to the Christmas Television epsiode list.  I'll try to make up for it today!

There’s nothing like professional rivalry and a good bet to get people in the mood for Christmas! That’s the set up for NewsRadio’s “Stupid Holiday Charity Talent show.”  Unlike many Christmas episodes that suspend ongoing story because it can’t coherently contain a holiday focus, NewsRadio uses  “Stupid Holiday Charity Talent show” to continue an existing conflict in the plot – Matthew (Andy Dick).  He has been let go from WNYX, and Mr. James (Stephen Root) tells the other employees that he will give Matthew his job back if one of them wins a talent show.  This situation reinforces everything we love about the characters in this program; they are either very talented but too insecure to assert themselves, or they are talentless but too naïve to know. 

If for no other reason but to see Phil Hartman, you should watch “Stupid Holiday Charity Talent show.” You might even begin to think of knife throwing as a holiday tradition – somewhere! After all, “Come on, people! In the right hands, knife targeting is safer than driving.”

Today's episode is a new favorite of me, Modern Family's "Express Christmas."  Like the characters who try to slap together a Christmas celebration after discovering they won't be together on the holiday - and this only leads to chaos - I've held this episode for a day when my own chaos limits preparation of the day's entry.  With final grades to figure and conference proposals to write, not to mention trying to make myself presentable for my husband's company holiday party this evening, I'm calling today "Express Blog" day.  But the episode is the important thing anyway, and you can see it HERE. 

A Christmas Carol is very overdone when it comes to holiday television episodes – unless the show adapting it is Topper and the guy writing it is George Oppenheimer, who wrote the screenplay for A Day at the Races and Broadway Melody of 1940, among other notable scripts.  What makes the 1953 Topper episode “Christmas Carol” different is not the comedy (the story has been done in many sitcoms, including The Odd Couple episode appearing on this blog), but that being nagged by ghosts is an everyday occurrence for title character Cosmo Topper (Leo. G. Carroll). 

If you haven’t seen the show, and there is EVERY chance that you haven’t, Cosmo and his wife move into a LA house haunted by its prior owners, a young couple who died in an avalanche.  Along with the ghost of the St. Bernard Neil who died trying to save them, George and Marion Kerby (Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys) make it their deathly vocation to bring a little fun into bank vice-president Topper’s life. Mischief abounds! 

In “Christmas Carol,” Topper falls asleep reading the Dickens story and dreams he is Scrooge, which isn’t too far from the way the rest of his household, living and dead, already perceive him.  His “ghosts” in the dream are, well, his ghosts, George and Marion.  Rather than being a fantasy episode out of sync with the non-holiday episodes, “Christmas Carol” is a delightful continuation of the ghost-filled life of Cosmo Topper.

The episode is a bit difficult to find online, but HERE is a short clip.  This is one of the few times that Neil the dog actually “speaks” in the series.  There are other Topper episodes available on YouTube, many of them penned by the series other remarkable writer, Stephen Sondheim. 

Halfway through this Christmas TV blog marathon, it makes sense that I revisit where it all began, with a gun-toting Santa.  Today, however, the episode is not the grotesque imaginings of Parker and Stone, but the grotesque psuedo reality of the Vietnam War as told in China Beach (1988-1991).  Even the title of the Christmas episode, “X-Mas Chn. Bch. VN, '67,” refuses to give the holidays a break from the war.   

China Beach is actually more like M*A*S*H than South Park.  It tells the stories of medical personnel from the 510th Evacuation Hospital and the R&R facility, also located at “China Beach.”  Like the soldiers at the 4077th, the folks trying to make it through the war at China Beach balance the everyday tragedy with which they are faced with romance, alcohol, and other forms of physical recreation.  It reads as much more serious than M*A*S*H, but that’s only if we ignore the poignant drama that always resting just below the humor of the sitcom about the Korean War.

In “X-Mas Chn. Bch. VN, '67,” the hospital is working with a skeleton staff because most of the personnel have taken holiday leave.   Lt. McMurphy (Dana Delaney), Captain Richard (Robert Picardo), and Major Garreau (Concetta Tomei) are inundated with patients, including a Santa with a machine gun.  The characters are short on Christmas Spirit, especially Richard, who finds out his wife back home is cheating on him.  Beckett, who is in charge of the morgue, has to must console a Vietnamese woman whose cousin, a ARVN soldier, has been killed in battle.  The obvious message, as with any military themed program, is that Christmas and war don’t belong together, and that is what makes this episode so touching and so grotestque.

“X-Mas Chn. Bch. VN, '67” makes this Christmas list not just because the episode was so memorable for me, but also because China Beach is for me one of the best programs of the late 80s.  It is where we are introduced to the talents of Dana Delaney and Marg Helgenberger, playing the prostitute K.C. who tries to make the world think she only cares about profits but who is one of the most compassionate characters in the series.  It is also Ricki Lake’s first real television role, which closely followed her memorable work in Hairspray.   For anyone who has not seen the series, it is worth visiting.  And “X-Mas Chn. Bch. VN, '67” is certainly worth placing on the holiday schedule if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that friends and loved ones in far away and dangerous places will experience a far different Christmas than those of us back home.

I’m sure no one would be surprised to hear that I have long been influenced by television.  I admit to having difficulty as a child and even young adult separating the real from the fictional, which may explain how shows like McCale’s Navy and Black Sheep Squadron had something to do with my stint in the military (which quickly taught me that little in real life is as television presents it).

My father was an ex-cowboy and ex-soldier, so military and western stories took priority on our television set when I was growing up.  Of all those programs, McCale’s Navy was my favorite.  I saw Lt. Commander McCale (Ernest Borgnine) and his sidekick Ensign Parker (Tim Conway) as the military equivalents of Lucy and Ethel, never quite seeing that line that shouldn’t be crossed, which always led to some predicament and many corrective shenanigans.

Which is exactly what happens in “The Day they Captured Santa” (1962).  McCale and his crew are trying to make it a Merry Christmas for some orphans on a neighboring Pacific island.  When McCale, dressed as Santa, and one of the other sailors parachute in, they find the Japanese have taken the island and the orphans and nuns are in hiding.  Aside from having to talk his way out of captivity, McCale also has to do a lot of double talking to get out of trouble with Captain Binghamton (Joe Flynn), whose turkeys McCale and the boys stole to provide a Christmas dinner for the orphans.  Since it’s a sitcom, all is well at the end, and a Merry Christmas is had by all, except, of course, the enemy.

I wrote in yesterday’s entry that I don’t watch many sitcoms these days.  When I was young, however, many memories were made from my family laughing together while watching half hours of excellent entertainment provided by stars like Lucille Ball, Carroll O’Connor, and Ernest Borgnine.  These actors had earned their reputations in Hollywood before moving to the small screen, so TV was not a training ground for film, which is often the case today.  Borgnine came to television with a Best Actor Oscar in hand, and while McCale’s Navy may not be considered the same caliber of story as Marty or From Here to Eternity, it was excellent comedy, and “The Day They Captured Santa,” while dated, is an excellent Christmas story. And I suspect Borgnine’s own naval service made the series a labor of love for him.

I have had the good fortune to meet Ernest Borgnine. I help to run an international film festival founded by and named after George Lindsey, a longtime and very close friend of Ernest Borgnine.  “Ernie” appeared at the George Lindsey UNA Film Festival a few years back, and I mentioned to him that he was partially responsible for me joining the military.  He laughed that big, gap toothed laugh and said, “That’s a good thing, kid!”  I let him think it was.

Merry Christmas Ernie!

You may have noticed that the sitcom episodes in my Christmas retrospective have been pretty vintage.  There are so many good dramas on these days that sitcoms have become my television “filler.” One comedy I try to watch regularly is The Big Bang Theory; not only does it offer intelligent humor, but getting most of the nerd references makes me feel quite smart.  And here are four characters who share my love of action figures!  The Big Bang Theory also delivers its share of touching moments, none more so than in the Season 2 Christmas episode, “The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis.”

As with most early Big Bang episodes, romantic tension between Leonard and Penny provide a backdrop for Sheldon’s social disability.  Learning that Penny plans on giving gifts, Sheldon opts for the scientific answer for how to pick a gift to equal whatever Penny gives him; he purchases a selection of bath item baskets in different sizes so that he can give her the correct one once he determines what that may be. 

Aside from Sheldon’s endearing cluelessness when it comes to gift giving, the episode’s plot is pretty normal sitcom fare.  Spicing it up considerably is guest star Michael Trucco (Samuel Anders from Battlestar Galactica).  The true present under the tree for viewers comes in the last few moments when Penny’s gift to Sheldon is revealed to be a napkin Leonard Nimoy signed after wiping his face on it.  There aren’t enough bath item baskets in LA to equal this gift for Sheldon, so the best he can do is give her all the baskets he bought and wrap them in the sweetest thing of all – a hug. 

Sheldon hugs, Dr. Spock, and Battlestar Galactica … these are a few of my favorite things… and I seem to be in big company as this was voted one of the 100 Best Television Episodes in a TV Guide Poll.  Unless you have the DVDs, Amazon Video, or are pretty sharp at finding other sources of video streaming, viewing the episode may be a little difficult, but it is certainly both Christmas worthy and nerd worthy.

 Awkward hugs to you all!

Hill Street Blues is one of the programs that opened the door for television scholarship, and for that I will have an eternal fondness for the show.  Well, that and the fact that it was one of the best programs of the 80s. And through its writers and actors it has become parent and grandparent to such important television series as Deadwood and NYPD Blue.  

“Santaclaustrophobia” was Hill Street Blues’ only real Christmas episode, but it’s hard to imagine the writers could come up with anything to best this Season 3 holiday show.  As with the M*A*S*H Christmas episode I wrote about earlier, “Santaclaustrophobia” brings out each character to his/her fullest, and does so via their emotional experiences in the episode.  Belker’s (Bruce Weitz) psyco gruffness is magnified once he puts on a Santa suit to try to catch street thieves.  Viewers see exactly what a young boy sees when he tells Belker, “You ain’t no Santa.”  Belker soon has enough of the kid and responds, “How would you like a nice crushed vertebra for Christmas kid?” 

Yet we know that Belker has a soft side to balance all the gruff, and “Santaclaustrophobia” provides the narrative opportunity to develop it.  Belker leaves on the Santa suit to play Claus in the precinct’s Christmas party at the children’s hospital.  Belker is almost unrecognizable in this cheerful role, just as he is unrecognizable in one of the episode’s closing scenes when he arrives home on Christmas eve, places a Christmas card on the window sill where he has lined all his holiday greetings, and sits down for a meal of warmed-up soup eaten in front of the TV.  We might be sad for Belker, and we probably feel odd for being sad for Belker, but the greatest irony is that Belker seems totally happy and at peace with his solitary Christmas Eve.

Belker’s holiday peace stands in stark contrast to what the others in the precinct are experiencing – which is a kind of Christmas Claustrophobia.  Bobby Hill’s (Michael Warren) absentee, gambler father shows up for his usual holiday visit during which he takes his son for as much cash as he can get.  Captain Furillo’s (Daniel J. Travanti) ex-wife is missing their happy holidays together, and Furillo is stuck between those memories and making new ones with Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel).  Washington (Taurean Blacque) can’t get over his guilt for accidentally killing a man, and it becomes even worse when he tries to speak to the man’s widow and she angrily announces she will be suing him.  And the entire precinct is up against a wall trying to stop a gang of violent robbers.  All in all, it is a pretty claustrophobic Christmas at Hill Street. 

The entire episode is a highlight, but especially delightful are the cops dressed as dancing snowflakes and the pursuit and arrest of the robbers by Santa and his merry band of elves and reindeer.  If you haven’t seen “Santaclaustrophobia,”  you should go right here and watch it; it is one of the top of my Top 25.