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This likeable '80s sitcom managed to have it both ways. Just as "All in the Family" appealed to both the liberals who laughed at Archie Bunker as the epitome of what's wrong with this country and the people who laughed with him, thinking he was right on the money, "Family Ties" offered a clever reversal of a standard sitcom premise. Instead of having the parents be conservative and the kids rebellious, the creators of this show gave audiences two former flower children as parents of three kids who couldn't have fallen farther from the stalks. All that concerned oldest son Alex (Michael J. Fox) was making the Forbes list of the world's richest men, while teen daughter Mallory (Justine Bateman) only cared about boys, and precocious little Jennifer (Tina Yothers) was the world's smallest pragmatist. Whether you thought the parents and their Sixties idealism were silly or the Young Republican mindset of the kids, there was something in this show that made you laugh. And the "you" became a pretty big plural.
Though "Family Ties" was still a quiet hit its second season, by the third year it jumped to Number 5 on the Nielson ratings. Partly, it was a case of good timing. The show reflected America's changing values ushered in by the Reagan era in 1981. The generation that had answered Kennedy's call to "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" gave way to the "Me Decade" and a new focus on personal advancement. And so to "with it" children, parents like Steven and Elyse Keaton (Michael Gross, Meredith Baxter-Birney), who were former anti-war activists and Peace Corps workers, were horribly out-of-touch.
At one point in the first season Alex gets giddy over the prospect of dating a new girl whose parents belong to a country club, and Steven quips, "I haven't seen him this happy since Reagan got elected." As a point of fact, President Reagan once said that "Family Ties" was his favorite show, and it's no question which characters made him laugh and which made him swell with pride.
With many sitcoms, as characters proved popular, the focus of the show swung their way, and that happened with "Family Ties." Though Season 2 finds a number of relatives and faux relatives popping in, Fox and Bateman were bit hits with teens, and so the shows began to reflect that. But the pandering to public tastes was offset by stronger writing than we usually see in a family sitcom. In first-season episode where a family friend hits on 15-year-old Mallory and she tells Alex, he says, incredulously, "He used to bathe you when you were a baby!" A beat passes and then Mallory deadpans, "I think he wants his old job back." That kind of strong writing continued into the second season. There aren't a lot of zingers--just thoughtful or clever lines that pop up in almost every episode.
Here's how the 22 episodes play out in Season 2, transferred to four single-sided discs and housed in a single-width clear keep-case with two "pages" to help hold the discs:
1) "Tender is the Knight." The big brother in Alex comes out when he sees another girl dating a guy who's beneath her, and decides he should ask her out to help her self-esteem.
2) "Homecoming." A college man asks Mallory to go steady, but alarms go off when he confesses to Alex that he's thinking of quitting Princeton and Mallory might be a good excuse to use for his parents.
3) "The Harder They Fall." Elyse loses her cool and socks Alex's teacher on parents' night, and when Steven goes to apologize, he ends up decking him too. What happened to make love, not war?
4) "This Year's Model." Mallory enters herself and Elyse in a mother-daughter modeling contest and gets jealous when Mom gets all the attention.
5) "Not an Affair to Remember." A pretty co-worker tempts Steve with a "no-strings" affair, and with Elyse occupied with her architect's life, it doesn't look good.
6) "Speed Trap." Alex gets Mallory to help him score some "speed" to help him study, but then he ends up going a little crazy on the pills.
7) "Sweet Lorraine." Alex's blind date, a fan of his radio show, turns out to be a 40 year old French divorcee who has a young daughter.
8) "Batter Up." In a rare episode to feature Jennifer, baseball coach Alex gets his sister to recruit a new, unpopular girl to play on the team after the others are felled by the flu.
9) "A Keaton Christmas Carol." Yep. Another version of the Dickens' classic, with Alex (who else?) getting the visitations.
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