G is for Gary

Gary David Goldberg died this weekend. Esquire has a piece on How Family Ties Healed America:

...and it captures an element of “Family Ties” that helped elevate it from diversion to something more important: No matter how much we sympathized with the parents, it was Alex we loved.

Just last week I happened to watch the series finale, and, even though I've always loved the show, I was still surprised at how flat-out funny Alex was.

I highly recommend watching the A is for Alex episode, which teetered by the moment back and forth from earnest and almost over-wrought to howling out-loud funny. More on the episode HERE:

And yet, something funny happened as I was watching “‘A’ My Name Is Alex.” I’d braced myself for the worst, but when the big therapy scene began—that half-hour stage play appended to the end of a 20-minute sitcom—I found it much better than I’d expected. I probably would’ve laughed derisively at it when I was 20. Perhaps I would’ve groaned at it at 30. But at 40, I experienced the episode more like I did at 16: as a heartfelt, occasionally clever attempt by the Family Ties creators to break the mold a little, while still trying to be funny and to talk about the issues important to them. 

Maybe people remember “‘A’ My Name Is Alex” as being more issue-driven than it actually is; maybe that’s one reason it gets a bad rap. But Alex’s friend Greg didn’t commit suicide, die of a drug overdose, or get killed by a drunk driver. He was involved in an ordinary, arbitrary accident, and the episode is primarily about how someone with a life as planned out as Alex’s deals with the revelation that everything can change overnight, for no good reason.