Dear reader - I was a huge fan of Family Ties. I saw it when it first aired and Alex P. Keaton's right wing rebellion against his hippie parents was one of the greatest moments of TV for me. I'm a night owl, and have been watching it late at night ever since the pandemic. I hadn't seen it since the '80s, and even then missed the last few years (at least) after going to college. Family Ties became an afterthought, but in that numinous Covid-19 way it has reintroduced itself into my life.

I have a few quick takeaways, and this from the vantage point of a true fan, who will never forget how Michael J. Fox burst onto the scene. In the early seasons, or the first episodes, the power of the dynamic between Alex and his parents is palpable, and why I must've loved it so much as a fourteen year old. Alex P. Keaton was everyone at Oakwood school with hippiesque parents, who assumed their children would follow their lead, but often didn't. I wasn't exactly Alex, but he was the most intellectual character on the show, not to mention the most alive. His character continues to resonate to me, but for some reason the show stopped focusing on him after the first or second season, and shifts to Mallory, so let's get to her.

A friend of mine at work was revisiting Family Ties around 2012 with his girlfriend, and said "Mallory may have been the reason Family Ties was popular." I'd have to agree with this. I still have a teenage crush on her when I watch this, and I'm far from a teenager! I know that the show was horribly sexist by making the cute girl a ditz, and the cute boy an egghead, but both actors were the stars of this show - Michael J. Fox and Justine Bateman, not to be confused with her brother, who became more famous (?) than her, but I'll never understand why. The truth is Mallory and Alex are reacting against their parents and this was inherently attractive - Mallory through fashion, something that hippies disregarded, and Alex through conservatism.

Jennifer, the youngest, is the most like her parents, and the worst character in the cast. It's not that Tina Yothers is bad, but like many child stars she became an awkward adolescent, whereas that was where Alex and Mallory began. I want to say that most children who blindly take on their parents ethics become boring, and while that may be too sweeping in the case of Steven and Elyse Keating this may be true. Again, the casting was perfect, and part of why this dynamic show that became insipid was able to survive for so long, but the parents are lame. I know I'm saying this from the point of view of Alex and Mallory, who ultimately love them, but Steven and Elyse have neither the glitz of the liberal elite that was soon to takeover the Country through the presidency of Bill Clinton, or an outsider perspective that we're lead to believe their peers may have had after the Berkeley protests. (The opening montage for the first season or two shows them meeting at a People's Park protest with Steven speaking, but this was blotted out after a season or two). Steven and Elyse are weak kneed liberals before the demise of the New Deal Democrats, that held on through the Eighties, but were soon to be annihilated by '92.

I don't think there was an equivalent to Family Ties though many shows copied the quirky family feeling, but none captured the politics. (Right now, I'm watching the parents singing "Blowin' in the Wind," and Alex making fun of them. It was a running joke of the series for the kids to make fun of folk music, something that bonded Mallory and Alex). I remember my stepdad coming home from work and watching me watch it. He wasn't a fan of TV sitcoms, thinking them stupid, and made fun of me for watching shows like "Three's Company," but was intrigued by Family Ties - "They've inverted All in the Family," he said, and he was right. The show made the kids the conservatives.

There's a lot wrong with Family Ties. It is getting me through the pandemic but it is all too clear to me that I may be the only person alive who still likes this show, or sees the good in it. The Michael J. Fox zeitgeist is obviously gone and has been soon after "Back to the Future," or "Teen Wolf." The political moment the show is recreating is so ancient to the Millennials that it may as well be the Ice Age (the cold war). The Democratic Party that served as a counter balance to Alex P. Keaton has disappeared, along with his William F. Buckley inspired Republican one, that Alex was emulating. In the later seasons, or rather 2/3 of the episodes it too often lapses into a rather unrealistic family drama where the politics are left behind and everyone has a soft side. But even in these fragmented moments I see my youth and why TV history is political history. I'm alive in the era the series is showing, a ghost on the wall of the set of the Keaton's Columbus, Ohio, home, a true believer. I laugh at Skippy's unrequited crush on Mallory, who secretly likes it, because the Gen X man was Skippy, a dorky outsider lame enough to be friends with Alex, marking him a square, even if Alex had charisma. Skippy was anti-charisma and the portent of grunge.

The worst move the show ever made was making Elyse have a baby in mid-life by season 5 or so, a naked attempt at making the show relevant. If I was five years younger, and watching Family Ties for the first time in the late '80s, I would've missed all the angst of Alex P. Keaton, living the life of a conservative in a liberal love nest, and losing his mind. I would've had no idea that the show had an edge where the parents loved their child but couldn't understand him, and likewise their child loved them but couldn't understand them. No one in the family really challenges anyone by the later seasons since the secret is out that they all love each other and never intend to leave home, with their political differences melting away. This may be how it actually happens in loving families, but it doesn't make for interesting television. The Keatons become no different than the Brady Bunch but without any of the groovy fashion or psychedelic colors.

But those first episodes were fascinating. The Keatons weren't going through the problems of the "generation gap" that TV exploited throughout the '70s but a real ideological struggle that surpassed the concept of a misunderstanding. If they only could've kept this vain going we all might think of Family Ties as one of the best shows ever, but instead it's a curio from a time gone by but my time. Steven and Elyse would've had a divorce, or at least a separation, and Alex would've and/or Mallory would've taken sides, and there wouldn't have been a silly reconciliation at the end of the 1/2 hour episode, but would've been followed up by more emotionally confusing episodes where the ethics behind the politics would come to light. It would've been a li'l more like Rhoda where Joe and Rhoda were the first TV marriage to divorce mid-series, but this depressed America, even in the rather truth telling '70s, when Carter gave his "Crisis of Confidence" speech on national TV. Instead, Family Ties sought safe terrain after a radical opening that put it on the map and in that way followed the sell-out of the Steven and Elyse, with the conservative inclinations of Mallory and Alex, as if the show had found a middle ground within the seemingly conflicting paradigms of the characters.