Benson Had a Sweet Reunion With His Late Mother in an Award-Winning Christmas Episode

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https://popculturereferences.com/ben...stmas-episode/

We continue our look at some notable 1980s Christmas episodes by looking at an unusual, but charming, Christmas episode of Benson.



We continue our look at some notable 1980s Christmas episodes by looking at an offbeat episode of Benson that led to Robert Guillaume used as his submission for the Emmys, and got him the Emmy for Best Actor in a Comedy Series.

Benson was a long-running sitcom spinoff of the series, Soap, where Robert Guillaume won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor. His butler character was spun off into his own series where he played the head of household affairs for an scatterbrained governor (played by James Noble) and his young daughter (Missy Gold). Benson didn’t get along with the other workers, played by Inga Swenson and René Auberjonois, and much of the humor is from Benson insulting them.

As time went by, Benson kept getting bigger and bigger jobs, including by Season 6, he was the Lieutenant Governor.

In a very good Season 2 episode, “No Sad Songs,” Richards had a tough task. She plays Benson’s mother (she played EVERYone’s mother. She once joked about the amount of great actors she played the mother of over the years. If you name a famous Black actor, odds are she played their mom at one point), but she also dies midway through the episode, so she has to make enough of an impression in that half of an episode for us to both A. mourn her but also, perhaps even more importantly, B. see why Benson is having such a hard time with her death, in that their relationship wasn’t necessarily entirely a pleasant one. She does a great job.

So now, in Season 6, she’s back when Benson is injured in an accident. She does an “It’s a Wonderful Life” routine by showing him what the world would be like if he chose to go to Heaven instead of return to his life and finish his living pursuits…



The characters are all in absurd situations in the future, and Benson realizes he needs to go back to Earth to prevent them from happening (Clayton is now the corrupt governor without Benson to temper his instincts, the governor was framed for crimes without Benson being there to protect him, and is now working as Clayton’s butler, Katie fell in with a bad crowd without Benson there to guide her, and is now divorced from a football player, and Klaus has lost her mind).

In both Christmas episodes, the show found reasons for Guillaume to show off his impressive voice (he was a singer before he was an actor).

It’s a hacky, hacky episode, but Guillaume had done such great work on the series otherwise (like the aforementioned episode where his mom died) that I think he got a bit of a “lifetime achievement” award for this one.