Nielstalgia: Revisit The Top 20 TV Shows Of Thanksgiving 1996

Consider for a moment that, in a time after VCR Plus and before DVRs, a Friday night television show was a top-20 hit. These days, we can catch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend whenever we’re ready for it, but back then, you had to sit in front of the television at the appointed time. Can you imagine? And enough people did exactly that for this episode, in which the Cigarette Smoking Man assassinates John F. Kennedy. Were there that many conspiracy theorists, teenagers, and teenage conspiracy theorists in America in 1996?

Where to stream The X-Files

Network television shows used to really pull out all the stops for November Sweeps. Explosions! Cliffhangers! Huge guest stars! This episode of Caroline in the City features a show-stopping cameo from…the disembodied voice of Julie Andrews, and some purchased footage from the stage adaptation of Victor/Victoria. Caroline in the City didn’t last real long.

Where to stream Caroline In The City

A couple of notable things here: 1) Grace’s infant son was played by twins Dylan and Cole Sprouse, the latter of whom is now a sexy Jughead on Riverdale, and 2) Brett Butler allegedly exposed herself to the actor playing her 12-year-old son. What I’m saying is that Grace Under Fire was 20 years ahead of its time.

Where to stream Grace Under Fire

We will address NYPD Blue and its various bare asses another time. But for now, let us turn our attention to the CBS 2-part television adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, featuring Eric Roberts and Anthony Edwards as the killers, and as young Bobby Rupp, a Ryan Reynolds fresh off of teen soap Fifteen. Really, this entire column is just an elaborate ploy to get you to binge Fifteen on YouTube, because its Canadian melodrama, dime-store-synth score, and social-media-free teenage lifestyle is exactly what you need right now:

A Thanksgiving episode in which Paul and Jamie try to contain the news of Jamie’s pregnancy, as though it were a virus, in a pseudo-parody of the 1995 film Outbreak. Also, this may be the first network television mention of the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” theory of relativity, complete with a sweeps-month cameo by Bacon himself. The show itself features Leila Kenzle and John Pankow, peerless network sitcom supporting players, playing to the back row. They don’t make them like Mad About You anymore.

Where to stream Mad About You

Here is one of my greatest pet peeves: you know how when someone makes a deep-cut reference in conversation, and then someone else does one quick little mirthless laugh? Like, a person mentions Gilbert and Sullivan (or an obscure Civil War battle, or “Are You Jimmy Ray”), and then the person they’re talking to just goes “HA.” Not a real actual laugh, just an acknowledgement: “You are referencing a thing smart people know about, I am familiar with that thing, and I need you to know it, so: HA.” I call that ha “The Frasier laugh.” Don’t do it.

Where to stream Frasier

Listen, there is no way to say this without just coming out and saying it, so that’s what I’m going to do: I get a strong pierced-nipple vibe from Drew Carey, and I always have.

Here’s 60 Minutes’ idea of sweeps month content: in November 1996, Andy Rooney finally devoted his show-ending segment to his unruly eyebrows. I have no idea what else they covered in this episode, but I will point out that this is the first show in our countdown so far without modified Rachel haircuts and monochromatic sweater sets.

Watch the "Andy's Eyebrows" segment of 60 Minutes on CBS All Access

With the Haley Joel Osment AIDS two-parter still a season off, and Chuck Norris memes even further, this show was kind of just coasting on its nursing home fan base. This week’s episode easily beat its 10pm Saturday competition on ABC, a post-My So-Called Life Zwick-Herskovitz dramedy called Relativity. Check out this cast! Check out this WG Snuffy Walden theme music! Check out David Conrad’s 1996 time capsule of a haircut! Relativity only lasted one season too, due largely to being buried on Saturday nights when its target audience was out of their houses and trying to have sex with each other.

News magazine shows were still holding on in 1996, and there’s no real way to determine what this particular episode was about. So let’s talk about what was happening on the netlets in 1996. UPN was on three nights a week, with offerings like Homeboys In Outer Space, (this week featuring an appearance by Tempestt Bledsoe as herself), and Nick Freno: Licensed Teacher. Here’s a promo for the latter, in which a precocious 14-year-old student of licensed teacher Nick Freno accidentally meets him in a singles’ club, possibly giving Roy Moore ideas.

The WB was still pretty much just 7th Heaven and The Wayans Bros at this stage. I’ve heard they made their receptionists answer the phone “The Dubba-Dubba-WB,” though they were free to add as many Dubbas as they chose. This is both unconscionably cruel, and funnier than anything I saw on UPN or The WB in 1996.

The networks weren’t doing much better. Comedy was strong, particularly post-Mad About You urban relationship sitcoms like Something So Right featuring Mel Harris and Jere Burns, and post-Cheers star vehicles like Rhea Perlman’s Pearl. Rhea’s son in that show was played by Dash Mihok, who would go on to do the cover photography for Alanis Morisette’s Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. This paragraph is so 1996, a bowling shirt just grew out of my torso.

While we’re on the subject of network sitcoms I never watched, has any modern television star pulled such a thorough vanishing act as Anthony Clark, whose Boston Common was in its first proper season around now? Dude went on to a million seasons on CBS with Yes Dear, and now…not a peep. Not even a Twitter account! Ditto for the rest of the Boston Common cast, now that I think of it. Come back to the five-and-dime, Vincent Ventresca, Vincent Ventresca!

I have never watched this show, because it seemed uncool, and at 25, I was terrified of not being cool. But if it’s as saccharine and blandly uplifting as I imagine it is, I may have to start bingeing it for medicinal purposes.

At this time in my life, the piece of art that got me out of my frequent gloomy moods was The Cardigans’ 1996 US debut album Life, a CD I played so many times that my roommates had to hide it from me. It is Swedish pop at its best, from the moment just before “Lovefool” briefly made them stars, and it has finally been released on streaming services. Put it on repeat and have a dinner party where you make Hamburger Helper, as I almost certainly did.

Earlier in the year, the short, beautiful, disastrous run of The Dana Carvey Show had played out on Tuesday nights just after Home Improvement. The Hulu documentary about the show, Too Funny To Fail, is this week’s required viewing, even though Louis CK is all over it and it still feels bad to look at his face. My favorite part of the whole thing is an ABC promo featuring a Very Special Episode of Home Improvement, in which Jonathan Taylor Thomas is afraid he’s going to die- of AIDS probably; AIDS was huge on 1990s Very Special Episodes- right into an excited announcement of what that week was called “The Diet Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show.” The world was not yet ready.

Not-unrelated: this week’s episode of Ellen centers around a friend’s pregnancy test, as Ellen herself inched closer to the coming-out episode which would kick off May sweeps. This episode is interesting for a few reasons: because the writers were clearly running out of story ideas for a central character with no personal life of her own, because the opening credits have Ellen as a fourth member of ZZ Top, and because a doughy 1996 Jeremy Piven with male pattern baldness is one hundred times sexier than the primped, plucked and oiled 2017 version.

Where to stream Ellen

In 1994, NBC premiered Friends. It was huge. The next year, they said: “What if we did this exact thing, but with slightly different people in a slightly different New York neighborhood, and Jonathan Silverman is Courtney Cox?” If it had lasted more than two seasons, eventually Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles would have gotten his own one of these. (In fact, Molly Ringwald herself was over on ABC Wednesdays with her sitcom Townies, featuring a pre-Dharma Jenna Elfman and a pre-Gilmore Lauren Graham.)

This is the first of the truly great Friends Thanksgiving episodes, where the gang fights for the Geller Cup, dinner is ruined, and there’s some Dutch woman for Joey and Chandler to fight over. The IMDB page for this episode has listed under “goofs” the fact that Chandler runs a reverse in a scene where he’s supposed to be running a post pattern. If you can still watch the show with a clear conscience, God be with you.

Watch "The One With The Football" episode of Friends on Netflix

The first of the truly great Friends Thanksgiving episodes did slightly less well than an average episode of Suddenly Susan. As Twitter’s most annoying people say: let that sink in.

So we could talk about the tragedy of David Strickland. We could talk about Nestor Carbonell, and the fact that I hosted a Bates Motel aftershow and the producers made me wipe his eyes with a make-up wipe on live television to prove to viewers that he doesn’t wear eye-liner. We could do a career retrospective on Barbara Barrie.

There will be time for all of those things. But right now, let us address the feud between Kathy Griffin and Andy Cohen.

Listen, I don’t know who’s in the wrong here, and I don’t care. Andy probably should have clammed up when the TMZ cameramen came around. Kathy should probably decide whether the Real Housewives franchise is great fodder for her act or a misogynistic nightmare. What I do know is this: a feud of this magnitude is Hillary Clinton Administration behavior. This is the kind of thing we can watch play out when we’re not worried about being vaporized or losing our insurance. The world is burning down around us, and even on the least chaotic day, we have to see at least one photograph of Donald Trump’s chin. We do not have the emotional bandwidth for this right now. We need our allies pointed in the same direction. Get it together, you millionaire genius weirdos.

Who cares? The number one song in the country this week was “No Diggity” by Blackstreet, a song that lives on at sporting events and circuit gyms to this day. The top alternative song, playing on radio stations that only five years before were playing Warrant, was Bush’s “Swallowed,” which- fun fact!- is actually worse than anything Warrant ever did. And the number one album was The 7 Day Theory, the posthumous album Tupac Shakur released under the name “Makaveli,” which has nothing to do with the 1998 single “Splackavellie,” which I just had to go look up to make sure I wasn’t imagining. I wasn’t. The 1990s were weird.

The classic season 8 episode “The Abstinence,” in which a forced break from sex makes George smarter. This one is also notable for a subplot in which Jerry bombs in front of a group of middle schoolers, a moment that would echo decades later when the real-life Jerry complained about college students not laughing hard enough at his jokes.

Watch "The Abstinence" episode of Seinfeld on Hulu

Susan leaves town, Mark tries to convince her to stay, they kiss, she waves a sad goodbye from the window of a departing train, the way people are always doing on screens and never in real life. But this is the exact right note on which to end this countdown, because we did leave a lot in 1996 that I truly miss: confident governance, a thriving and cohesive alternative music culture, and, most tragically, Jeremy Piven’s chest hair. If you need me, I’ll be in the garage working on my time machine.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the new Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.