TV Club Advent Calendar: Santa Vs. The Snowman
The A.V. Club loves the holiday season, and we also love opening small doors in paintings of Santa Claus and pulling out stale chocolate the manufacturer couldn’t sell four years ago, then eating it...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: ’Twas The Night Before Christmas
The A.V. Club loves the holiday season, and we also love opening small doors in paintings of Santa Claus and pulling out stale chocolate the manufacturer couldn’t sell four years ago, then eating it...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: The Twilight Zone, “The Night Of The Meek”
In the Eby household, holiday television watching is both a joyful and fraught endeavor. My dad and younger brothers love action movies and car chases, while my Mom can’t stop raving about the endless...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: South Park, “Mr. Hankey, The Christmas Poo”
If you grew up watching television in the ’90s, chances are there was a cartoon that caused some kind of moral panic, a show that the kids “got” and the parents didn’t. First it was The Simpsons,...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Two Saturday Night Live Christmases: 1975 and 1976
The A.V. Club loves the holiday season, and we also love opening small doors in paintings of Santa Claus and pulling out stale chocolate the manufacturer couldn’t sell four years ago, then eating it...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Thirtysomething “The Mike Van Dyke Show”
The A.V. Club loves the holiday season, and we also love opening small doors in paintings of Santa Claus and pulling out stale chocolate the manufacturer couldn’t sell four years ago, then eating it...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Gilmore Girls, “Forgiveness And Stuff”
The A.V. Club loves the holiday season, and we also love opening small doors in paintings of Santa Claus and pulling out stale chocolate the manufacturer couldn’t sell four years ago, then eating it...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale
Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale is technically a Christmas special, but other than the box art depicting Ricky Gervais covered in lights with the tagline “Bloody merry,” you’d hardly know it....
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: The Snowman
The Snowman has been a staple of my Christmas viewing regimen for as long as I can remember, and although both the animated short and Raymond Briggs’ book have reached the status of holiday classic by...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: How The Grinch Stole Christmas
Growing up, there were three never-miss holiday specials: Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Those weren’t the only specials my sister and I...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: The Simpsons: “’Tis The Fifteenth Season”
Lisa: “Dad, you don’t have to outdo Mr. Flanders. Just remember the spirit of the season.” Homer: “Is it despair?” In a way, yes. Sure, it’s a cynical appraisal of this, the season of giving, but just...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Ziggy’s Gift
Imagine, for a moment, that you’d never seen Ziggy. That’s not easy. Ziggy’s pretty unavoidable, even to those who never pick up a newspaper, where his strip has run for 40 years. But try to blank all...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: The Star Wars Holiday Special
There’s a certain threshold in every journey of fandom when one stops trying to obsessively protect the object of one’s love from any unpleasant adulterations, and just opens the floodgates to the...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: A Claymation Christmas Celebration
We tend to value the timeless over the ephemeral. The ephemeral has a certain stink about it—it’s fleeting and shallow. Of course, both “ephemeral” and “timeless” are adjectives that tend to be thrown...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Chrismukkah in The O.C.
When thinking back on holiday specials of yore for this project, the first thing that popped into my head wasn’t nostalgia for my Rankin/Bass- and Chuck Jones-filled youth. Instead, I immediately...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Christmas on MTV
If you happened to stop by the Blake household between 1988 and 1994, chances are you would have found me in the basement, nestled in a beanbag, watching MTV. I watched entirely too much television as...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
The ’70s were a crafty decade, thanks to the roving bands of stray hippies who helped popularize a “back to the land” lifestyle that saw even everyday folk making their own clothes and toys (while...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Three Christmas Carols
There have been hundreds of adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, not to mention the countless homages, winks, and flat-out thefts of the original narrative’s structure. It’s like when...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: Lost, “The Constant”
I’m not entirely sure we’ve acquired enough distance from Lost to look back on it with new eyes. The feelings stirred by the show’s finale, either good or bad, are still too close to the surface for...
View ArticleTV Club Advent Calendar: A Charlie Brown Christmas
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. There’s this girl and this guy. They’re engaged to be married. And then the girl has this weird dream with an angel in it. She’s pregnant, apparently, with the child...
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