It’s the most very special time of the year! Break out your cocoa and cozy sweaters and celebrate the holidays very special style! There will be sappy speeches, charitable cloying, and hopefully lots and lots of tacky holiday wear. Grab your cocoa and footy pajamas, and let’s get started!
It is Thanksgiving morning and Danny’s mom is snowed in and can’t make it out of Tacoma. This leaves the Tanner’s without any Thanksgiving food, so the men decide to take the girls out to a restaurant. But DJ will have none of it. 
She’s all like Thanksgiving should be spent at home! We always had Thanksgiving with mom at home! (Yep, this is one of those rare episodes where we admit the girls once had a mom and that she died tragically). Also, Joey walks around randomly saying the “Miracle of Thanksgiving” and making a trumpet noise. Was he also the voice of Face on Nick, Jr.?
DJ says that she can handle the meal because her grandma was going to put her in charge of the turkey, so she can handle the whole thing. Plus, last year her mom taught her how to make a “picture perfect pumpkin pie.” So in honor of the late Pam Tanner, the family decides to stay home and let the ten year-old cook.
The first season of this show is just so great. I still cannot understand why Joey is a necessary addition to this family, but at least when the girls were younger it made sense that they needed an extra hand (maybe). Anyway, this episode is super cute because everyone is adorable and dancing around the kitchen while setting the table.
Everything is really shaping up into an excellent Thanksgiving. Only, DJ did not remember to defrost the turkey and so they somehow end up with a frozen yet browned bird. This is amidst a large pre-dinner speech in which DJ asks Danny if her mom would be proud of her for making dinner. And how she wasn’t sure she could do it, but things really turned out great.
So how can they possible tell this little girl who is trying to impress her dead mom that the turkey she made sucks? Well, they don’t exactly…they shove the turkey back into the oven, crank it up as high as it will go, and try to purchase a turkey off of a couple of lost travelers who ask if they can use the phone. None of it pans out though, and the non-defrosted turkey catches on fire. Then Stephanie drops the “picture perfect pumpkin pie” and everything is ruined.
Danny takes DJ aside and tells her that her mom would have been proud of her for bringing everyone together to make the Thanksgiving meal because Pam knew that the important thing about Thanksgiving is family. But the really heart-wrenching stuff (and yes, I’m already tearing up by this point) happens when 
Jesse goes to talk to Stephanie (who is hiding in her closet because she dropped the “picture perfect pumpkin pie). At first things start off with the run-of-the-mill “everyone makes mistakes” lesson, but Stephanie is very adamant that not everyone makes “pie mistakes.” So Jesse decides to tell her a story about when he was a kid and did something very stupid to show that sometimes kids do stupid things and it is okay. He takes her to his room to show her a childhood photo album, specifically a haircut that he allowed her then ten year-old mother to give him when he was five. Stephanie feels better after hearing the story and enjoys seeing childhood pictures of her mother, but Jesse ends up being very upset by the whole interaction.
I guess it is easy to forget as the series goes on that Jesse is Pam’s kid brother and spends a lot of the first season being arguably more affected by her death than anyone else. I guess it’s less depressing on a sitcom to show the grieving brother rather than the grieving children or spouse, but nevertheless his performance is very effective. Danny and Jesse realize that they will never get over losing Pam, and that some bad feelings just stay with you. But Danny tells Jesse that it’s important for him to keep sharing his memories with their family because that is what will keep her a part of their lives and is probably the only thing that will ever make him feel better.
Very Special Lesson: Don’t let the children cook the turkey.
Very Special Activity: Share all of your great (and not so great) stories with your families this season. And if they’re driving you nuts, then you can post them here!
If you’ve watched The Golden Girls then you have probably heard a lot of crazy St. Olaf stories. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Rose hurt her back thirty years ago pulling a plow to till the soil during plantin
g season. Ever since, she’s been taking narcotics. That’s why she’s so un-phased and stupid all the time. Rose is always on drugs. When Sophia accidentally knocks the pill bottle into the sink all of the pills go down the drain, and Rose cannot get a new prescription for two days. Things come to a head when she lashes out at a pizzeria owner who has come to the house to film a commercial starring Sophia.
“Excuse me I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m very upset”
–Rose Nyland during opiate withdrawal
The girls stage a mini-intervention and Rose agrees to quit cold turkey. She deals with this harrowing endeavor by having her friends stay up all night and playing a rousing game of Monopoly—St. Olaf style. Rose starts to waver as the night goes on and Blanche tells her that she understands how Rose feels because she tried to give up sex cold turkey after her husband died. Then she slept with her sister’s husband. Whoops. Anyway, just as Blanche finishes her story, Rose realizes that the sun is rising. She has made it threw the night without pills, and is thus free forever form addiction! Except she takes one pill later that day…so then she calls a rehab center.
Flash forward 28 days and…okay, now she is really cured!
Wait…if the only problem was that she didn’t get to take her pills for a day and got cranky…hm…that sounds like me without coffee.
Very Special Lesson: Even if you can totally afford your habit, you don’t do anything harmful to yourself or others, if you get a little cranky without your little helper then it’s time to go to the Betty Ford clinic.
First of all, isn’t rainforest one word? Secondly, it’s really cool that youngest child Jennifer wants to rid the family home of 80’s toxins. This was before we removed formaldehyde from our hair conditioners, people! But she doesn’t know how to accurately dispose of any of the waste.
She gets depressed and ends up talking to a parakeet about the Brazilian rainforest. Her parents try to help her relax by watching a baseball game on TV, but there is a breaking news update on the Exxon Valdez (ripped from the headlines!) and she runs upstairs on the verge of tears. Jennifer gets like super, super depressed and decides that life is pointless because the environment is in danger.
Her parents convince her to see the school counselor and she ends up freaking him out. By the end of their session he totally agrees with her and feels like there is nothing they can do and that life is over and depressing.
Luckily, Jennifer has two ex-hippie parents who know how to rally a depressed activist. They tell her that things seemed bleak and hopeless when they tried to save the whales. They encourage her to join Greenpeace or Sierra Club. They also use the pet parakeet to makes sure there’s no Radon in the basement.
Very Special Lesson: Don’t freak out. Join a club.
The Cosby’s are busy preparing for a wedding shower that Denise is throwing for her friend Veronica. Theo is super bummed because he spent all day decorating the house only to find out that the party is strictly women-only. There’s some talk about gender roles (Bud wants Rudy to get him juice because she’s a female and she’s all no way, Bud.) Then Theo and Cliff spend forever hanging shelves because Clair wants to keep them away from the party. Theo tries to read instructions in French. Denise is like yay hanging out with the bride to be! BORING!
Where’s the very special part? Let me skip ahead. We find out seventeen minutes into the show that Veronica is only getting married because she is pregnant. This must be one of the slowest very special reveals ever in the history of very special episodes. And it turns out she did it on PURPOSE! This was a planned pregnancy. She and her boyfriend decided that the only way to get her father’s permission to marry while still in college was to get pregnant.
Wait. Huh? You need your dad’s permission to do stuff in college? Her fiancee had to drop of out school to get full time work but is unemployed! And they have no money! This is how you squander a booming 80’s economy, people. This really stupid master plan. Also, who thought that having a kid would be less expensive than eloping and paying for college? Or maybe getting married and not telling her dad.
Anyway, she’s not a Cosby kid so we don’t have that much to talk about with her. Denise is freaked out by what Veronica told her, so she confides in Clair. Denise is all worried like what if I did something like that? Maybe I can understand it! And Clair is like you would never do that because that is something a crazy, selfish person does.
And you know what, yeah, that is something a crazy, selfish person does. But it’s also something a person who does not know math does. How did these people get into college?
Very Special Lesson: College is expensive, but nothing is more expensive than having a kid.
97.9%* of Boy Meets World episodes are about Corey, so I wanted to review a very special episode about Eric. Eric was definitely the funniest character, and Will Friedle is pretty funny in real life too. I don’t have twitter but that doesn’t keep me from reading his. You see, sometimes very special episodes are about not birthing a child before you’re ready. Other times, they are about not adopting someone else’s before you are ready.
In “Uncle Daddy” Eric is dating an older woman. When he asks her out three times in a row, she reveals that she has a son. She introduces them and tells him that he has to have a relationship with her son if he wants to have a relationship with her. Like what? Three dates in a row and suddenly it’s time to join the family? This poor kid! His mom is totally going to tug on his heart strings because we already know the Eric is the best big brother…and erm maybe father figure? Also, I’m pretty sure this kid is the kid from Liar, Liar.
Eric is awesome with the kid. No surprise there. This is during his My Date with the President’s Daughter phase (a.k.a. his perfect phase) which quickly degrades into his “Plays with Squirrels” phase. (Actually, now that I have reached that age, I’m pretty sure he was just having a quarter-life crisis.) He’s so great that he decides to read the kid aa bedtime story instead of going to see a Jim Carrey (omg from Liar, Liar!) movie with Cory and Shawn. But he totally falls apart when he can’t turn down a game of foosball and leaves the kid sitting at a table alone. Then he bemoans the fat that he has not hung out with grown ups all day, which the kid overhears. So he asks Eric for money for ice cream and the kid runs away (presumably to wait for the bus). When Eric notices he’s lost him, he realizes that he can’t be a dad just yet. 
He explains everything to the MILF and she’s like super cool about it. She’s not at all mad at him for leaving her kid unattended and she’s totally understanding of the fact that he’s not ready to be a dad. So she breaks up with him. Because it is the fair thing to do. Because she is the coolest woman ever. Like wtf. He should marry this woman.
Eric gets home from his breakup and finds Cory mouthing off to his parents about taking the car when he wasn’t supposed to. Eric tells him to chill out and give his dad a break. (He’s maturing!) And then he decides to study and retake the SAT’s (more maturing!)
Very Special Lesson: You will meet the perfect woman. She will have a perfect kid. But you’ll be a manchild and it won’t work out. Sorry. Them’s the breaks.
*based upon a study in which I was not entirely paying attention run over the course of the past fifteen years.
Home Improvement was not a show known for high drama or life lessons. It was pretty much a ridiculous (ridiculously hilarious) show about an incompetent handyman and his witty family. But (as you well know) it’s not an 80’s/90’s sitcom without a very special episode.
Can you guess what this episode is about based on the title?
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, this episode is about weed! During an on-location shoot for Tool Time (the show with in a show) Tim scales a tree in his backyard to demonstrate the hazards a blizzard can take on suburban homes. Turns out blizzards also damage trees, and Tim (the incompetent handyman) falls into the rough of his gazebo/all of the wooden lawn furniture.
As Tim and his sidekick, Al, are sifting through the wreckage, Al finds a baggie of “oregano” that he assumes Jill (Tim’s wife) keeps outside in the cold to maintain optimum freshness. Tim tells Al that what he’s holding is a bag of weed, and Al freaks out because his “prints are on the bag.” Naturally, at this point the only thing to do is to stage a stakeout behind next door neighbor Wilson’s fence. Wilson expresses his shock that drugs were found in his very own neighborhood because he has only ever heard about “kids and drugs in the newspaper.” Clearly, Jill and Tim are the only adults in this show who are edgy enough to have any experience with illegal substances. After a Friday night spent in ten degree weather, Jill and Tim finally see their eldest son Brad go into the gazebo to retrieve the pot.
After lecturing Brad on how pot could ruin his whole life, they send him up to his room while they figure out how to deal with them. But Jill is left reeling because Brad accused them of being hypocrites since they probably smoked too when they were his age. Tim is all like no way all I did was drink beer! but Jill is all like omg I smoked so much pot. I should have helped my son learn from my errors. Then Jonathan Taylor Thomas (as middle child Randy) accidentally stumbles onto his parents freaking out. At which point his dad accuses him of smoking too, and JTT is all like “what no way!” and he really means it because JTT is a golden boy and above the influence and funny and the greatest 90’s heartthrob ever.
So then JTT goes upstairs to talk to Brad because he’s shocked that Brad smoked and he didn’t even know it. The Brad is all shocked that JTT has not smoked and JTT is like clearly too intellectual to get high and then have pseudo-intellectual conversations. Then you hardly see JTT anymore for the rest of the episode because you can tell by this point in the show’s run that he’s pretty much over acting and ready to enroll in Harvard.
Finally, Jill and Tim agree that the best way to handle Brad is to come clean about their own experiences (and ground him for months). As it turns out, Jill was a huge pothead in high school. One time she went to a Led Zeppelin concert, smoked some pot laced with something weird, and ended up in the ER thinking that her name was Charlene Fogelman. Personally, I think that sounds horrifying and like a terrible waste of a Led Zeppelin concert. I’m also glad that this stuff is slowly getting legalized, so that people in real life will be able to purchase from reliable (legal) sources that don’t mix PCP into their product. But I digress. After this, Jill ends up in jail and Tim has to bail her out because her parents won’t even speak to her. How lucky is Jill that she was still a minor, right? I don’t even think we could have Home Improvement if Jill had been a mom with a criminal record! It would have been like Orange is the New Improvement. Ultimately, Brad decides that smoking pot is not worth the risk of his soccer scholarship. Well, like no shit it isn’t.
Very Special Lesson: Don’t do anything that will make you think you are Charlene Fogelman. I hear she’s a convicted felon.
Aside from the opening credits and the fact that Danny Tanner is the host of “Wake up, San Francisco” you could pretty much forget that Full House took place anywhere other than a studio lot. But this episode really incorporates the Northern California setting because there has been an (off camera) earthquake.
Stephanie is totally traumatized from the aforementioned (off camera) earthquake and refuses to leave her dad’s side. Danny’s too flattered by all of the attention to realize that she has turned into a total nutcase. He only realizes that she has a (very mild) case of PTSD when she freaks out and won’t let him go to a business dinner. During a (very detailed) game of (product placement) Barrel of Monkeys, Danny pulls Stephanie aside to discuss her separation anxiety. She insists that nothing is wrong, and Danny feels like he’s the worst dad ever because he does not know how to help her.
In the last five minutes of the show, he decides to take her to a therapist. The therapist has her draw a picture of her family, and 
Stephanie also includes a gigantic crack in the middle of their house (from the earthquake). She also drew Danny outside of the house because he was late getting home on the day of the earthquake. Then, with a series of leading questions, the therapist determines that Stephanie has been anxious since the earthquake because she does not know where her dad is when he runs late getting home from work. She decides they should make a list of all of the things that Stephanie and Danny can do, so that she will not worry when he is away. She proceeds to tell them both exactly how to behave, while Stephanie eagerly writes down everything she says.
Obviously, everything is fine now because Stephanie had a really great conversation with a mental health professional for all of five minutes. And no. This has nothing to do with the fact that her mom died suddenly at the beginning of this show. We don’t talk about that (unless John Stamos wants to talk about that).
Also, in this episode: DJ gets her first zit and decides that the best coping mechanism is to dress like Cousin It.
Very Special Lesson: You can solve all of your big problems by drawing one picture. Hurry, go buy the 64 pack of Crayolas (with sharpener). It’s the secret to life!
So we all know how Zack is the perfect most caring, cool dude ever right? Wrong. Zack hates fat people.
Hard times have fallen on the Bayside Student Council and they do not have the money to pay for new cheerleading uniforms. If you doubted that 90’s fashion is back in full swing, then look no further because the dude who suggests that they have a fundraiser for cheerleading uniforms is dressed exactly like no less than fifteen men in my office at any given time.
Zack decides that a fundraiser is a great time to auction of people as dates because you know sex sells. But wait. It’s not creepy. Jessie says that it is creepy, but Kelly and Lisa say it is not creepy. And if there is one thing I’ve learned from Bayside, it’s that Kelly and Lisa make the rules.
At the date auction, no one bids on Slater. That’s because Jessie has threatened all of them.
But then Kelly feels bad for Slater and she pays $10 to put him out of his misery. So then Jessie blindly bids on the next person without even seeing him and it turns out to be Screech.
A girl whose name Zack couldn’t even remember when he tried to flirt with her at The Max bids $75 on him. Gross. But then our very special guest star (Wendy) pays $100 dollars and wins the date! Zack is such a jerk almost immediately, treating her as if being large is some kind of highly contagious form of Leprosy.
But wait! This is a two for the price of one very special episode!
Lisa buys a date with the guy who suggested the fundraiser, but he thinks she is an idiot and that hurts her feelings.
2 women. 1 scorned for her body. 1 scorned for her brain.
Lisa decides to totally change her personality à la Sandy from Grease, whereas Zack constantly ignores Wendy and lies in order to avoid hanging out with her. But Wendy catches him in the lie and decides to go to the dance alone.
So how does Zack learn to stop being such a shallow turd person? Well, he tells Jessie to stop whining about having to go to the dance with Screech because he is a nice person and she will hurt his feelings. Then Jessie is all like woah this is exactly like your situation with Wendy! And Zack is all like omg how have I been so awful?
Zack decides to reconnect with Wendy at the dance, but she won’t have anything to do with him. She’s not interested in dancing with him just so he can stop feeling guilty. (I love this girl.)
Lisa only realizes that her date is a jerk when he insults all of her friends. Agh, too real. But at least she figured it out after only one date.
Finally, Zack tells Wendy that he would really like to dance with her because he likes her. They agree to hang out at The Max after the dance and then we never see her again.
Very Special Lesson: Be nice to the uncool kid once to prove that you are not a jerk, but then you never have to talk to her again.
It’s Halloween at the Tanner’s! But the only way you would know it is that everyone is in costume for the first thirty seconds of the show when we get to see all of the Tanners in costume.
But it’s a Halloween fake out! I’m certain that the only reason they included any inkling of Halloween 
in this episode is because it originally aired three days before Halloween. Aside from being forced into witnessing an unbearable three stooges impersonation by Danny, Jesse, and Joey, there is basically no Halloween in this episode at all. So after the opening credits roll, it’s suddenly some inconsequential date in November. It is, however, a very special episode. And thus, I have a journalistic obligation to share it with you,
Jesse has sold his very first television commercial jingle! This one sale gives him the confidence to quit his job at the family exterminating business and pursue advertising/music as a full time career. Jesse’s dad is so pissed that he disowns him. He is literally so insulted b
y the fact that his kid won’t take over the family business, that he decides he cannot consider him a family member anymore. I mean I get that some people take the family business super personal, but did he forget that his daughter just died like a year ago and maybe he should not be casting his remaining child off so carelessly like he has dozens of children to spare? Oh well, at least his exterminator jacket has that super cool graphic design of a dead ant on the back of it.
We also, 
discover that Jesse is twenty-five years old. This is so beyond disturbing. Sure, Uncle Jesse is the cool and hot guy on this show but he cannot be anywhere close to my age. He’s like selling music and raising children and being hot and single and accomplished and how is he only twenty-five???
There’s also a subplot about Stephanie being afraid to go to the dentist. She gets some cold comfort from DJ, who tries to assuage her fears by saying that they are stupid. She says it is normal for littl
e kids to have stupid and irrational fears, and that she herself used to have them too. For example, she was afraid of being sucked down the drain in the bathtub when she was a kid. (This is so real. I had this same exact fear!!!) But DJ learned that the fear was unwarranted. And how did she discover that truth? By displaying some seriously sociopathic tendencies and unplugging the drain while baby Stephanie was in the bath. When Stephanie managed not to be sucked down the drain, DJ realized it was a silly fear. But oh my gosh, that is so twisted!
Eventually, Jesse’s mom forces her husband and son to make up by tricking her husband into coming over to the house and holding baby Michelle while Jesse tries to explain his hopes and dreams to him. Eventually, Jesse’s dad agrees to accept him back into the family even though he thinks his hopes and dreams are stupid. But he loves his kid and that is all that matters…right?
Halloween (Adjacent) Lesson: Love your kids for who they are and not who you need them to be.
The Very Special Blog 