Frank’s Place's Only Christmas Episode

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

We continue our look at some notable 1980s Christmas episodes by looking at Frank' Place's only Christmas episode, which included an offbeat Hannukah dinner party.





Frank’s Place was a great sitcom created by WKRP in Cincinnati‘s Hugh Wilson, starring former WKRP star Tim Reid (who also executive produced the show with Wilson) as Frank Parrish, an Ivy League professor who discovers that his long-estranged father has died, and Frank has inherited his father’s restaurant in New Orleans, Chez Louisiane, a cultural institution in the neighborhood. Frank plans to just sell it (initially to some developers, but chooses to instead sell directly to the workers of the restaurant), but due to a “curse,” Frank decides he will just move to New Orleans and run the restaurant himself.

The basic setup for the series was Frank’s culture shock coming from he Northeast down to New Orleans, and running a business he doesn’t know anything about. It also tackled a number of serious social issues.

In this Christmas episode, obviously the only Christmas episode the series ever had, one of the conflicts of the series was resolved. Frank is interested in a local woman (played by Reid’s real life wife, the great Daphne Maxwell Reid), but it turns out that her mother lent Frank’s dad $10,000 to keep the restaurant afloat. So Frank sells his entire personal collection of antiques to pay her back, clearing up any roadblock in Frank romancing her.

One of the most notable characters on the show was the only White cast member, Sy ‘Bubba’ Weisberger, played by Robert Harper, in probably the role of Harper’s career. In this episode, Frank celebrates Hannukah with Bubba’s family, and Bubba shocks everyone by telling them that Frank is his boyfriend. As he later notes, his mother never accepted any girlfriend he ever had, but when he showed up at her place later on with the girl he was currently seeing, his mother was now thrilled.

The other main plot of the episode was Frank’s uncle Ray visiting (played by the late, great John Witherspoon). Ray was the MUCH younger brother of Frank’s dad, and he has seemingly lived a nomadic existence, only visiting his older brother once a year at Christmas. At the end of the episode, in a bizarre twist, we learn that Ray is actually a mailman who is married with kids. He never wanted to admit to his older brother that he DID settle down, and he, for some reason, has decided to keep this charade up with Frank. It really makes no sense as a plot twist.

Still, the episode had a nice Christmas celebration, and some nice New Orleans Christmas music, and it was a fun episode overall. This was such a great show, and it sucks that it only lasted a single season.

I discussed this episode with Drew Mackie and Glen Lakin on their awesome podcast, Gayest Episode Ever.