Family Ties Season 1: No Nukes is Good Nukes

I just watched this episode. It’s Thanksgiving. Elyse’s parent come to visit. Her dad is played by Dick Sargent, who played Darren on Bewitched. Mallory, played by Justine Bateman, looks very cute but she can’t act very well.

Elyse and Steven go to protest nuclear weapons, but they get arrested. They have the opportunity to get out of prison if they will sign a sheet of paper agreeing that they’d never protest nuclear power again, but they refuse. It’s a matter of principle.

At first the children are mad at their parents for getting themselves arrested on a day they should spend with their family. But then they come realize that it’s something their parents care very much about and they support them for it.

At the end of the episode, the children and grandparents bring the Thanksgiving meal to the jail, and they get to have a happy family Thanksgiving after all.

It wasn’t really the best episode of the first season, but perhaps the most anachronistic. Who would go protest nuclear weapons today? No one. They’d be protesting global warming instead.

This episode of Family Ties demonstrates how the end of the Cold War led to global warming alarmism. Liberals who need to protest something had to find some other issue.

Comments

[Nasty]

No doubt liberals will protest this:

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/03/is-nasa-hiding-its-climate-data-too/

How dare someone asks NASA about the data!

[James Watson, we love you.]

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi1389232153/

Half-Sigma, since your new obsessions are fighting the evil gaiaists and watching "Family Ties". I thought I would bring attention to the fact that Michael Gross, the dad on the Family Ties series, also stared in a show where he fights evil environmentalists and government bureaucrats. Tremors: The Series. Yes, it is stupid series, but this episode of Tremors involves Michael Gross's character Burt exposing a group of evil environmentalists altering research data in scientific studies in order prove their insidious beliefs. It is strangely related to your recent obsessions with climate-gate and "Family Ties".

[coldequation]

Right. Likewise, the left has a hard-on for Israel now that South Africa is gone.

[Sheila Tone]

Like a middle-class, professional, homeowning married dad would be out protesting anything. They sure did glorify hippies in the 1980s.

[Sheila Tone]

The more I think about that show, the more I realize how it distorted my views of society and the economy. It made the liberal elite lifestyle seem like something normal people could just choose. It never indicated that either of the parents came from wealthy backgrounds. But the only people who live like that -- really liberal, working for a nonprofit, yet economically secure with happy intact nuclear family -- are from among a privileged minority. Most mature people who hold the views displayed by the parents on that show are marginal and dysfunctional. And often stinky.

[Kevin K]

There were a lot of AIDS marches in the early nineties. Also, "Take Back the Night." I don't think they were short of topics to complain about.,

[Henceforth Danforth]

"...South Africa is gone."

There is a lot of truth in those four words. Sad, really.

[Turambar]

"Like a middle-class, professional, homeowning married dad would be out protesting anything. They sure did glorify hippies in the 1980s."

I believe that the dad was supposed to boring nature documentaries for PBS, so #storychecksout. I remember one of them being "The Egrets' Regret".

You are right that there was a fair bit of hippie nostalgia in the '80's- probably because they were harmless anachronisms like General Franco.

The interesting things was that Family Ties was conceived as an MBB vehicle with the the SWPL's coping with juggling their 'radicalism' and raising a family. That quickly got tossed out the window as the producers realized that kid driven storylines were more interesting. The original premise survived as a foil for Alex P Keaton's over the top behavior.

[HS: As far as I can tell, Family Ties was just supposed to be a family sitcom featuring a Wise Dad who solves the family problems. That the parents are liberals and the children conservative (Alex) and just apathetic (Mallory) was the gimmick which made the show different than zillions of other shows. When Michael J. Fox turned out to be such a good actor and audiences liked the Alex character so much, the result was that he became the show's main character instead of the dad.]

[JHP]

-"...South Africa is gone."

There is a lot of truth in those four words. Sad, really.-

Just wait until Mandela dies. But maybe if you go see the movie Invictus, you'll feel better (buying a firearm will really make you feel better though. You take my advice, Sheila?)

[Turambar]

http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=familyties

"Significantly, the show's timely focus on Alex and his contrasts with his parents was discovered rather than designed. Family Ties' creator was Gary David Goldberg, an ex-hippie whose three earlier network shows had each been canceled within weeks, leading him to promise that Family Ties would be his last attempt. He undertook the show as a basically autobiographical comedy which would explore the parents' adjustments to 1980s society and middle-aged family life. The original casting focused on Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney as the crucial Keatons. Once the show aired, however, network surveys quickly revealed that audiences were more attracted by the accomplished physical comedy, skillful characterization, and approachable looks of Michael J. Fox, the actor playing Alex. Audience reaction and Fox's considerable, unexpected authority in front of the camera prompted Goldberg and his collaborators to shift emphasis to the young man, a change so fundamental that Goldberg told Gross and Baxter-Birney that he would understand if they decided to quit. The crucial inter-generational dynamic of the show, then, emerged in a dialogue between viewers, who identified Alex as a compelling character, and writers, who were willing to reorient the show's themes of cultural succession around the youth. Goldberg's largely liberal writers usually depicted Alex's ideology ironically, through self-indicting punch lines. Many audiences, however, were laughing sympathetically, and Alex Keaton emerged as a model of the clean-cut, determined, yet human entrepreneur. Family Ties finished the 1983 and 1984 seasons as the second-highest rated show on television, and finished in the top 20 six of its seven years. President Ronald Reagan declared Family Ties his favorite program, and offered to make an appearance on the show (an offer pointedly ignored by the producers). "

[DaveinHackensack]

"This episode of Family Ties demonstrates how the end of the Cold War led to global warming alarmism."

Michael Crichton made that exact point in State of Fear several years ago. Worth reading. What a master that man was. You look at the afterword and annotated bibliography in the back of that book, and you see that he did an enormous amount of research on the subject, including studying primary academic data. And then he writes a didactic novel about it, and managed to make the novel a page-turning best seller. I can't think of anyone else who could have done that.

[Yawner]

I attended lots of nuclear protests in the '80s.

I took the pro-nuke side.

My sign: "Keep the Nukes, Ban the Kooks!"

[Peter A]

"the left has a hard-on for Israel"

Sensible people on the right (i.e. patriotic Americans) have no great love for Israel either, the difference being I guess that the right also has no great love for Palestinians, although the left does.

[James Watson, you are a god among men.]

"Sensible people on the right (i.e. patriotic Americans) have no great love for Israel either, the difference being I guess that the right also has no great love for Palestinians, although the left does."

Will Paul Gottfried is good example of what you are talking about.

[James Watson, you are a god among men.]

Well not will.

[Pookie]

Shelia:

Family Ties was set in Columbus, Ohio, where there are plenty of nice middle-class 4-bedroom homes in good school districts for under $200,000.

The mortgage on such places are under $1000 a month.

So two low-wage jobs like documentary producer / mid-level non-profit worker can easily afford a nice middle class life on $80,000 a year that would require $200,000 a year in salary in a place like the DC suburbs.

So you are wrong that

"But the only people who live like that -- really liberal, working for a nonprofit, yet economically secure with happy intact nuclear family -- are from among a privileged minority."