It's Thanksgiving week in Sitcomland (and in real life too – call your loved ones), and all your favorite shows are celebrating Turkey Day this week. Let's see what happened last night on the Thanksgiving episodes of Happy Endings, New Girl, Ben and Kate, and The Mindy Project.
Happy Endings – “More Like Stanksgiving”
CLAY: "More Like Stanksgiving" takes the usual sitcom thanksgiving episode flashback and gives it a new twist. In the beginning of the show, Max reveals that he finally got the DVDs from he and Brad's season on The Real World: Sacramento, where they met. Before their Thanksgiving dinner, the group sits down to watch an episode [...]
Every TV show leans on tropes to fill out their season. For the standard dramatic hour, it’s brilliant doctors/lawyers/cops with a complicating flaw. For animated sitcoms, it’s copying The Simpsons or copying the copies of The Simpsons. And for critically acclaimed premium cable, it’s so many naked breasts.
That’s why network shows pioneered the holiday episode. If you’ve got 23 episodes of funny! to do from fall to spring, it makes life a lot easier when Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and even Groundhog Day give you jumping-off points.
Now most shows do their holiday episodes with plenty of standard cheer. It’s like, why [...]
Marc Maron wrote an essay about his love of cooking, specifically on Thanksgiving, for Saveur: "I started to appreciate cooking in college thanks to a professor who was famous for his dinner parties. He was one of those borderline-inappropriate teachers, full of menace, intelligence, and sexuality. At one of his soirees I'd asked how he learned his craft and he said by reading cookbooks. Then he hit on me. That's it! I was inspired—not to be gay, but to cook. The idea that I could do something giving and seemingly selfless and still be the center of attention seemed magical. So, I started cooking for people (or, as a [...]
