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.
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