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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: January 19, 1983
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Family Ties, “The Fugitive (Part 1)” (Season 1, Episode 14) [Watch on Amazon Prime].
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Tom Hanks was not a novice to television in 1983. He’d already spent two glorious seasons as Buffy on the groundbreaking situation comedy Bosom Buddies. And while it’s true that nobody expected that Hanks would one day be a two-time Oscar winner and honorary dad of Hollywood, much in the same way that no one thought that of Shawn Wayans after White Chicks (still waiting on that one), he was at least a familiar TV presence. And yet there was a world of difference between a sitcom like Bosom Buddies and a sitcom like Family Ties, which may have taken a couple seasons to really hit at the heart of the zeitgeist of the American family sitcom in the 1980s.
So in that way, it was perfect that Hanks guested on Family Ties in the middle of its first season as Elyse’s brother Ned, who comes to stay with the family, only for it to be revealed that Ned is on the run from the FBI for embezzlement. I always loved when Family Ties would nod to Steve and Elyse’s counterculture ’60s history. It was the bedrock of the show, of course, but the fact that Ned is on the run from the Feds really accentuated the post-hippieness of the Keatons’ lives. They were never planting bombs with the Weather Underground or anything, but there was definitely a lifestyle they left behind when they settled down with a family.
Hanks is predictably great in the two-part episode, funny and full of pathos at the same time. It’s amazing how much character detail you can fit into Tom Hanks chugging a bottle of vanilla extract to get drunk(er). There are whiffs of the Very Special Episode at play, but as an excuse to watch Hanks do his thing at a level which he’d soon have long surpassed, it’s a lot of fun. It’s also fun to see Hanks and Michael J. Fox, two of the titans of the film and TV industries, respectively, sharing a scene together. You think Fox and Rita Wilson ever talk about this when they’re on The Good Wife together?
