The Ten Best FAMILY TIES Episodes of Season Four

[TMC]

https://jacksonupperco.com/2021/12/1...f-season-four/

Family Ties’ fourth season boasts the series’ strongest collection of episodes, representing what I’d call its peak, for while the premiere of The Cosby Show the previous year drove up Family Ties‘ Nielsens and also seemed to encourage an uptick in comic energy, as the show became more willing, like its neighbor, to more explicitly pursue laughs as a primary objective, Season Three merely suggested this correlation; Four makes it clear, as every single episode is comedically elevated in comparison to the show’s baseline. Now it’s competitive. Additionally, Four has the fewest Very Special Episodes (VSEs) of any Family Ties season — a stat that indicates a more conscious pivot away from the treacly, heavy-handed drama these family sitcoms typically employ but are unable to legitimately motivate (the closest here is an entry with Martha Plimpton as a juvenile delinquent), and towards the more humor-first style that The Cosby Show had used to distinguish itself upon its debut. Also, despite the Keatons adding a new member to their family last year, Four seldom involves the baby, avoiding the common trap in this subgenre of indulging a non-comedic plot device that often enables sentiment but can’t actually propel story. So, by minimizing the presence of the tot, Family Ties further signals an interest in focusing on its comedy more exclusively, especially in comparison to its domestic competition… Rest assured, though, if this happy absence of VSEs and the smart downplaying of the baby makes Four look like an imperfect example of this otherwise banal family sitcom subcategory, the year still reinforces all the other foundational tropes that you’d expect, for after Three’s pregnancy arc locked the parents into a more temperamentally even-keeled and supportive version of their roles — definitionally diluted (following the necessary mitigation of their politics) but more emblematic of the adult figures who usually populate these shows — Four is consistent about upholding the premised construct that exists within most traditional family sitcoms, where the parents are the moral status quo, and the kids err. And since everyone is around all the time now, particularly Meredith Baxter, who went on maternity leave for a third of Three — the structural necessity (if not the qualitative value) of the intact family is more obvious, guaranteeing a more fundamental affirmation of the premise on a regular, weekly basis.