Sha-La-La-La

Antenna TV has been airing episodes of "Family Ties" (often before Newhart!), which has reminded me of how big (and formulaic) that show was in the mid-80s.  The show clearly went through stages, namely:

1. The early years (1982-1984) - The show was on Wednesday nights and Alex was in high school and Michael J. Fox was somewhat credible as a teenager even though he was probably already about 25.  The show was originally supposed to be about the Baby Boomer parents (original premise:  cool parents, square kids), but the precocious kids, especially Alex, quickly stole the show.  Some of these episodes are actually pretty good, especially the ones with Tom Hanks as Uncle Ned, the stockbroker on the lam and eventually a wino.  I also remember the one with the acerbic teacher Mr. Tedesco.  The show wasn't a huge hit but had to be viewed as a bright spot on an otherwise bleak NBC line-up.


2. The glory years (1984-1987) - The show moved to Thursday nights after a new show that you may have heard of called "The Cosby Show."  The third season was transitional with Meredith Baxter-Birney on maternity leave and the show becoming even more clearly "The Alex P. Keaton Show."  After the huge box office success of "Back to the Future" in the summer of 1985, the transformation was complete.  Perhaps to accommodate Fox, the show, which had always been kind of formulaic, eventually became flat-out lazy.  Characters were added (a girlfriend and then another for Alex, a supposedly cute kid as baby Keaton, Mallory's inexplicably Neanderthal-ish boyfriend Nick), countless long-lost friends and relatives with problems were introduced and assisted in single episodes and never seen or mentioned again, and most of the remaining episodes came to be clearly focused on individual characters ("Mallory is a ditz," "Jennifer is maturing awkwardly," and especially "Alex loves to make money, ha, ha, ha!") instead of being ensemble pieces.  Ratings were through the roof.


3. The later years (1987-1989) - The show was moved to Sunday nights.  I can't say much about these episodes because I and most of America had stopped watching by this point.  My favorite episode from this era in reruns is the one where Skippy of all people joins the army before washing out of boot camp (ultraconservative Alex of course is visibly frightened when the recruiting officer encourages him to enlist).

Anyway, the show was a big hit and then we all forgot about it.  I don't remember "Family Ties" sticking around very long in syndication originally, and I hadn't seen an episode in almost 30 years.  Even so, the show's episode list is a fascinating compendium of many, many clip shows, the aforementioned troubled friends and relatives episodes, and episodes (usually featuring Mallory, Jennifer, or Elise) that were filmed and then inexplicably not aired before being burnt off during the summer several years later.