Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Since it's Thanksgiving (or at least it was when I started writing this), I thought it was appropriate to give thanks for all the great Thanksgiving episodes of TV! Here's a sample of a few of my favorite Thanksgiving episodes (limited to 1 episode per show, and limited to whatever clips I could find posted online).

Will & Grace: "Queens for a Day"

While the earlier Thanksgiving episodes such as the one where they spend Thanksgiving for 10 minutes with each person's family, or the one where Jack's mom comes to dinner and she doesn't know Jack is gay (they sound like Friends episodes when I describe them) might be more classic, one of my favorite Thanksgiving Will & Grace episode is "Queens for a Day" from Season 7. In this episode, the gang all goes to Queens for the day (as you might have guessed) to spend Thanksgiving with Will's boyfriend Vince's family. Will spends the day trying to impress Vince's mom with the perfect Thanksgiving dinner, while Grace and Karen both hook up with Vince's teenage cousin and Jack discovers that Vince's engaged sister is secretly a lesbian. This is how the big Thanksgiving dinner goes down:

Boy Meets World: "Turkey Day"
Cory is from a middle class family, and his best friend Shawn lives in a trailer park. Shawn decides it would be fun if Cory's family came over to the trailer park for Thanksgiving. But even though their difference in social class was never much of an issue for Cory and Shawn as friends, they'll soon learn that it'll be more difficult than they thought for their parents to get along. Here's what happens:

South Park: "Helen Keller! The Musical"

While most TV shows have Thanksgiving episodes about families coming together at a Thanksgiving dinner, this episode of South Park features the boys putting on a Thanksgiving musical about Helen Keller. The boys all want the show to feature a great turkey in honor of Thanksgiving, but Timmy, the handicapped kid who plays Helen Keller in the show, insists on using Gobbles, a handicapped turkey.

After Timmy realizes that the Broadway turkey trainer tricked him and sent Gobbles away to be slaughtered, Timmy leaves the show to save Gobbles. The play's director, the guy who starred in Les Miz on Broadway, steps in to save the show. It's a Thanksgiving miracle!

Everybody Loves Raymond: "The Bird"

My favorite Thanksgiving episode of Everybody Loves Raymond is called "The Bird", and involves the Barones having Thanksgiving with Amy's family. They're all getting along fine, until a bird flies into the window, and instead of trying to help save the bird, Amy's mother kills it to put it out of its misery, much to the shock of the Barones. A classic Thanksgiving episode ensues. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a clip of that episode anywhere on the Internet, nor can I find a clip from any of of the other classic Thanksgiving episodes (The one where Debra decides to serve fish instead of turkey, the one where Marie decides to make a tofu turkey instead of a real one, etc.). The only Thanksgiving clip I could find online is the one that follows. Still funny, but not the one I wanted to show. If anyone can find a better Everybody Loves Raymond Thanksgiving clip, please comment here and let us know!

Friends: "The One with all the Thanksgivings"

Friends has kind of been known for their Thanksgiving episodes, as it's a great opportunity to have all 6 characters in one room for one crazy meal. While there has been a great Thanksgiving episode nearly each of the 10 seasons the show was on the air, (including the ones where Underdog escapes, they play football, and Brad Pitt shows up to Thanksgiving and confesses he and Ross had an "I Hate Rachel Club" in high school), my favorite would have to be "The One with all the Thanksgivings". This episode had the friends sitting around and reminiscing about all the worst Thanksgivings that they've had, and is filled with tons of flashbacks to various Thanksgivings throughout their lives. Here are some of my favorite clips from that episode:

Hope you all had a restful Thanksgiving weekend!

TV Star Spotlight: Jim Rash

Our favorite new show of the season is a sitcom called Community. It airs at 8:00, the perfect start to the best 2 hours television (8-10 on Thursdays on NBC). While the show boasts a great ensemble cast of actors (including Joel McHale from The Soup, comedy legend Chevy Chase, and recent break-out star Ken Jeong [the naked Asian guy who jumped out of the car in The Hangover]) there's another actor who I didn't really know on the show, but looked very familiar. His name is Jim Rash, and on Community he plays the hilarious Dean Pelton, who is always trying to gain publicity for the school. Here's a clip of him from the most recent episode of Community (You can stop watching after the first minute and 15 seconds if you want, it's a really long clip. Or if you're enjoying it, keep watching!):

That guy looked very familiar to me, but I didn't know where I had seen him before. So naturally, I turned to the greatest website on the Internet (except for this one of course), www.imdb.com! I looked him up, and he has appeared in two of our favorite shows: Friends and Will & Grace! Even more interesting, in both shows, he appeared as a guy on a plane! In Friends, he was in the series finale as the guy who afraid of the plane's lack of "phalange" and in Will & Grace he played a steward who wouldn't let Grace into first class (until Will flirted with him). Don't believe me? See for yourself!

Monty Python: In Search of the Flying Circus

It all started last Saturday night when we were watching a DVRed episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon featuring 4 of the original cast members of the classic British comedy group Monty Python. (You can see some of their silliness here):

While we're fairly familiar with Monty Python (we've seen Holy Grail and Meaning of Life and we loved their Broadway musical Spamalot) we've never really seen the TV show where Monty Python first started, Monty Python's Flying Circus. But after watching the silly antics of these (now older) men on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, we decided that we had to go out and buy the complete series of Flying Circus on DVD. When we finished watching Monty Python on Late Night, it was already 10 pm, and most stores were closed, with the exception of Barnes & Noble, which closes at 11:00.

We went online to see the availability of the set, and we were faced with a dilemma. There are two different complete series sets of Monty Python's Flying Circus! The first one is called "The 16 Ton Megaset", which features all 45 episodes of the series, as well as 2 bonus disks of "Monty Python Live" which features some live shows that Monty Python did.

The other set was called the "Deluxe Mega Set", and in addition to all 45 episodes and the Monty Python Live disks, it also had all of the "Personal Best" DVDs (kind of like the SNL Best of DVDs, it has the best of each cast member's sketches) and also 2 new documentaries. The Deluxe Mega Set is obviously newer and better, but it is also of course much more expensive. On Amazon, the 16 Ton Set sold for $56.99 and the Deluxe Mega Set sold for $84.99. I always do like to get the best set available, but was it worth an extra $20 for the Personal Best DVDs (which is just a compilation of sketches on the other disks) and some documentaries?

After much deliberation, we decided that no, it was not worth it. We just wanted to see the show. We didn’t really need the documentaries (I later found out that the documentaries are available separately). So, we were set, we were going to get the 16 Ton Mega Set! Furthermore, at Barnes & Noble, it was on sale for 50% off! Of course Barnes & Noble is always more expensive then Amazon, but since it was 50% off, instead of it selling for $100, it was no on sale for $50! Plus, I could use my Barnes & Noble membership discount to get 10% off, so now it was only $45! Over $10 cheaper than Amazon (how rare!), and we could watch it TONIGHT! We were very excited, but after checking the "Pick it up now" feature on Barnes & Noble's website, we realized that it wasn't available at the B&N near us, but it was available at the one about 20 minutes away. Unfortunately, it wasn’t there, and it only appeared to be in stock because the website takes a while to update. They did, however, have the Deluxe Megaset, available for $130. We declined this overpriced offer, and went home, defeated.

We checked online again to see where the 50% off Megaset was available, and we saw that it was for sale 30 minutes away at a mall in New York, so we reserved the copy online. We went to Barnes & Noble, and there it was, behind the counter, waiting for us to take it home (this is a great feature!). By the way, for readers who are thinking of expanding their DVD collections, the Barnes & Noble sale is still going on, and as of right now, the Monty Python Megaset is the #1 bestselling DVD! If it’s not available near you, and you aren’t incredibly impatient like us, you can order it.

After going the wrong way on the highway and driving through the Bronx to get to J’s house, we watched the first 3 episodes that night. The show is very unique. It's a sketch comedy show, but unlike SNL, the sketches in each episode usually have recurring themes or references. At the same time, each sketch is completely random and unexpected. They also have these very creative and often hilarious animated segments which act as transitions from one random sketch to the next. Some sketches were funnier than others, but here's a few of my favorites. What do you think?