Death of the Very Special Episode

You know, I've spent many hours with children who've gotten involved with drugs. They start your age even younger.

In March of nineteen eighty three, at the behest of a sixth grader named Arnold Jackson, First Lady Nancy Reagan visited a classroom at New York City's PS four h six to talk about drugs.

And they're all tragic stories of kids with great potential whose lives were ruined.

But this New York City classroom was actually on a Los Angeles soundstage, and Arnold Jackson was a character played by actor Gary Coleman.

Who children about Missus Rady's.

Well, I happened to be here in New York and I saw that story about you in the paper, Arnold. You know I'm very concerned about drug abuse, especially among the young.

Missus Reagan was taping an episode of the popular NBC sitcom Different Strokes to promote her Just Say No anti drug campaign.

In the plot the series, regular Arnold actor Gary Coleman gets some help from Missus Reagan in his own effort to curb drug abuse among students.

Do you remember when the Nancy Reagan Different Strokes episode aired?

Yes, absolutely, because it was a big deal.

I mean, it was definitely like, this is something that we have to talk about.

This is Jessica Shawl. She hosts the pop Culture Spotlight on Serious Exam Radio, and it's written about television for decades.

I mean, I'm gen X.

The fact that my parents even knew I existed was like a minor miracle, you know. So the fact that adults were going on our shows, they weren't going on the news, they were going on our shows to reach us felt different and kind of.

Special, very special. Over thirty two million people watched The First Lady that night. Do you remember what your reaction to it was.

I'm sure that I took it kind of earnestly as a child, because we weren't cynical like children are now. Let's say, in like the twenty twenties. I think in the eighties there was a little bit more of like, oh, I need to listen to the First Lady and what she has to say.

This is Reagan.

I guess there's something I should say. I've tried drugs a few times.

Thank you.

That took as much courage as it did for Arnold to write a story.

This feels like the prototypical very special episode.

Yes, I mean absolutely.

The very special episode a mainstay of nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties television. It often came with a warning to parents that the ordinarily hermetically sealed off world of your favorite family friendly series was about to get injected with a dose of the real world. Tuesday, Very Special.

Fullhouse, We're starting a special two part show on a very sensitive and important subject.

You figured we'd talk to.

You kids and your parents two about smits kind of hard to talk about.

The laughs would still be there, just more muted. It could get awkward.

Well, I get eight present that I'm doing pretty good.

This was the sitcom itself in an in between state, experiencing its own well growing pains.

What happened to his second chance?

But never fear. The main characters would remain safe and unchanged, and in the end, all would be back to normal. It just might take more than one episode.

The resolution is a big part of it, and it might not be resolved in twenty two minutes because it's a big issue. It's a big issue, so it might take two whole episodes, which is really enough to unpack. Let's see AIDS molestation drug use, drug use.

They made headlines and big ratings until they were no longer special, just cliched. And then the very special episode was dropped from the schedule. I mean, who needs lessons when you have Seinfeld.

And just saying basically, there are going to be no very special episodes. That is the very thing that we will never do. I mean, what was the quote, no hugging nor.

Learning, No hugging nor learning from CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Morocca and this is a very special episode of mobituaries. This moment, the death of the very special episode. Can you speculate on what was the very first very special episode? I would speculate that it is a Norman Lear show. That's Jessica Shaw again. I also would have guessed that the very special episode began with the late Norman Lear. But we found something even earlier than the

Let me ask you something. Beaver is your father? Would he have a little bit of whiskey?

Hero? I'd never seen this before.

First of all, A plus research.

And it's it's so kind of surprising to see Jerry Mathers as the Beaver or kind of interacting with this alcoholic house painter.

Once Michael Billy set my father bottle, it was all that buttonhead brandiant.

Well, that's about what I'm talking about Beaver.

Of course, Beaver's parents find out and reprimand him, But big brother Wally makes the point that Beaver didn't know Andy had a problem. After all, Ward and June Cleaver hadn't told the boys.

You and Mom shouldn't be scared to tell us things. Somebody's got to tell a guy about all the bad.

Junk in the world. He's somehow like the writer's kind of saying, please, please, let us tell stories that have a little bit more grit, that are a little bit more complex.

It also feels like the entire premise of a very special episode is built on that one line.

Yes, as Wally Cleaver put it. Somebody's got to tell a guy about all the bad junk in the world. Ten years later, another family sitcom dared to do just that.

Bhy This is Elizabeth Montgomery Welcome to be Witch Next on ABC. Tonight's show was created in the true spirit of Christmas.

On Christmas Eve nineteen seventy, with silent night playing underneath. Elizabeth Montgomery, who played good Witch Samantha Stevens on Bewitched, spoke directly to viewers ahead of an episode entitled Sisters at Heart.

My friends at Oscar Meyern Company, and I feel it is a very special Bewitched, conceived in the image of innocence and filled with truth.

That's right. She even called the episode very special. That's because the usual bad things that happened on Bewitched involved spells gone awry, but in this instance, magic was used to shine a light on racism.

You've grown the part he said that we shall be colors, so we couldn't be sisters.

She's a big jump. That's daughter Tabitha, who is white and also a witch. Her new friend, Lisa is black. Tabitha ends up using witchcraft so she and Lisa can look more alike. She first turns Lisa white, then turns herself black, then turns the both of them polka dot. Additionally, Samantha puts a spell on her husband's racist client. He starts to see everyone, including himself, as black, and by the end of the episode, he's learned his lesson. I

Oh not the obvious, out in the open type of racist.

Not me.

No, I was a sneaky racist. I was so sneaky I didn't even know it myself.

Quick side note this episode was co written by a classroom of black students at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, making it even more special. But the Beaver and Bewitched episodes were very much exceptions to the rule. The sitcoms of the nineteen sixties were happily stuck in their own fantasy world, completely divorced from the reality of the times.

Come ride the little train that is rolling down the tracks to the junk show.

Yeah, where's Norman? Lare was like, Oh, we're going somewhere right.

Right, This train is actually going to a real place. My name is Norman Lear.

Norman Lear has changed the face of television. Until nineteen seventy one, he was a very successful, if largely unheralded producer writer in Hollywood, but then he burst upon the public consciousness when he took on bigotry with his All in the Family.

All in the Family starred Carol O'Connor as Archie Bunker, a man who longed for yesteryear, pigheaded and yes, bigoted, but also surprisingly likable. Every episode was special. The series regularly addressed racism, sexism, anti semitism. It featured one of the very first gay characters on television, and don't matter the topic, Archie Bunker didn't hold back.

His proud Roger is as queer as a four dollar bill and he knows.

It's not only cruel, Daddy.

That's an outright line.

Hello, something, Archie.

Just because a guy is sensitive and he's an intellectual and he wears glasses, you make him out of I.

Never said a guy who wears glasses as a quia.

A guy who wears glasses is a four eyes.

A guy who was a fag is a quia.

So I have to say, and it might be a super unpopular opinion. I'm glad they use that word that they use that slur, because that's part of what made the show so real.

Yeah, they didn't shy away from anything.

Isn't it so interesting that that scene could not air in twenty twenty three?

Right right? The big reveal near the end of that episode is that the person Archie thought was gay is in fact straight, while a pal he had assumed to be straight is actually gay. Huge numbers of people were being introduced to things they were not familiar with. Maybe they didn't even think they knew a gay person.

Yeah, absolutely, I imagine that was eye opening to them.

Another Milestone episode from nineteen seventy seven was about Archie's wife Edith, fending off a rapist. It was a two parter called Edith's fiftieth birthday, and I remember being talked about in hushed tones. I didn't have to be told that it wasn't for kids. What are you going to do? You ain't taken off?

You're close, are you? Yeah?

Then I'm going to take yours off.

Wouldn't you like a cup of coffeees?

Norman Lear became the biggest TV producer of the decade, helping to create an entire universe of sitcoms and.

Then there's mod.

On the most famous episode of Maud, the title character, a feminist plate by b Arthur, became unexpectedly pregnant and had to decide whether she'd carried the child's term.

Mother.

Listen to me, it's a simple operation now, But when you were growing up, it was illegal and it was dangerous and it was sinister, and you've never gotten over that.

Now you tell me that's not true.

It's not true, and you're right, I've never gotten note.

Maud had the abortion. Lear was also the force behind some of the first sitcoms centered around black characters, including Good Times.

You Couldn't help but notice all those bruises on Penny's.

Back, a nineteen seventy seven episode featured a young Janet Jackson playing the victim of child's abuse.

Oh those pennies at the awkward age. She's always falling down?

Isn't that true?

Dear?

Didn't you fall down?

Ah? One time I fell out of the tree and I landed on my pussy cat and a squished them.

And Pussycat sure leads a tough life.

What TV shows are certainly a good way to talk about these issues and call people's attention to them in a way that they may not be considering it.

That's Norman lear from a conversation I had with him back in twenty fifteen for CBS Sunday Morning.

Most people in their own emotionally crowded lives hear about these things, visit it in a short conversation, but their minds are not really there. So I think speaking about it in a comedy where they were even getting laughs about it can only be a good thing.

If you control them in with a story. At least you can maybe get them to then talk about it at.

Home in the next conversation they're familiar with it and perhaps a little bit more ready to embrace.

Norman told me that even decades later, he heard from viewers about the impact of his shows.

It's so touching. And we watched it as a family. We don't watch anything as a family now, and we talked about Archie and we talked about the subject matter. And the one thing that I think the show accomplished that I can count on because I've heard it through all the years, was that there are big words to me. We talked to the show and we.

Talked think about the things that Norman Lear was able to get away with, quote unquote, get away with talking about. And he was so powerful at that point that I have to imagine that there were I mean, there was that whole standards and practices department at every network that there must have been people who pushed back against certain things, lines that he wanted to do, or maybe maybe topics.

There was indeed pushback to many viewers shows like Norman Lear's were too candid. Additionally, there was outrage over the nineteen seventy four Linda Blair made for TV movie Born Innocent, which included graphic sexual violence and aired at eight PM when many children were watching TV. The networks went on defense.

The period from seven to nine PM is known in television as the family viewing period.

A period during which parents and children are supposed to be able to sit together and watch television without being made to feel uncomfortable or so the networks to find the family owner.

Which meant that in nineteen seventy five, shows like All in the Family, which had been airing at eight pm Eastern, had to move to later in the evening. Let's All Sing, the nineteen seventy five version of those were the day the cast recorded a parody of their opening number, mocking the Family Hour concept and celebrating what their later time slot would allow them to talk about.

Seeing Congers.

Robert Can Propose to Build.

In court, Lear and other writers and producers challenged the Family Hour. The court ruled that the Family Hour concept was a violation of the First Amendment, but it also said it had no authority to dictate how the network's programmed We Can Show.

My Pregnancy and John Boy Can Have b D.

Plus a quick ves sent.

After nine o'clock. The Family Hour wasn't going away anytime soon. On the other side of the break the nineteen eighties and the heyday of the Very Special Episode.

It was one of those things like can we just farm out parenting to this show. Yes, cool, We're super happy with that.

Hello, I'm Conrad Vain Tonight on Different Strokes, we're starting a special two part show on a very sensitive and important subject.

Different Strokes was one of the biggest hit sitcoms of the early nineteen eighties, airing at eight pm Eastern on Saturdays, prying family time. So in February nineteen eighty three, when Conrad Bain, who played the wealthy adoptive father of Arnold and Willis Jackson, spoke directly to viewers before the episode, you knew it was serious.

Now we urge families, children and parents alike to watch both of these informative episodes and then to discuss the problem presented, which is of deep concern to all of us.

He's saying, this is what we're going to show you. Parents, children, sit down and discuss.

This is how America we do very special episodes. Okay, So this episode was about stranger danger and pedophiles. It's Arnold and his friend Dudley, and they become friends with the owner of a local bicycle shop, mister Wharton.

You know, guys, you can just have an awful lot of fun with your close office.

Les's of course you live at the North Pole, going to freeze your tush off?

What kind of fun?

Well, for instance, as Skinny Dippit, mister Hohrton gives the kids wine, which is later discovered by Conrad Bain's character. Here Arnold explains what happened.

Well, while I was there with Dudley, he gave us some pizza and wine.

What else went on there?

He showed us some pictures.

Everybody was naked naked, and he showed us some kinky cartoons.

What do you mean by kinky?

Well, you told.

Me about the birds and bees, but that's nothing compared to what those mice were doing.

Who was laughing? Who is laughing?

Here?

I know? I think part of the awkwardness is that Carrie Coleman was such a star and they couldn't resist having him show his comedic chops, and here it is jarring.

I wonder if.

Maybe it's more jarring, and if they fell more compelled to make sure the laughs were there. Because the audience of Different Strokes was a younger audience as opposed to the leer shows. Those were smart, smart shows, and those were smart enough that adults were watching they weren't sort of here I'm going to spoonfeed us had come to a child.

That's Jessica Shaw again, and she's right. This was a younger audience, and this episode did have an impact. Newspapers reported the arrest of at least one suspected child molester in Indiana after a young boy recognized and reported predatory behavior in an adult. Now it's important to note that the term very special episode was never actually used by programmers. It just sort of became a joke later, so there's

Now but Nancy Reagan, I can tell you that much.

Let's go into Mister Belvidere, a show that I must confess I never saw until now.

That's Belvidere, Lynn Belvidere, Queen.

That's a girl's name. Mister Belvidere is a British butler who works for the Owens family in suburban Pittsburgh. Here he is greeting a friend of youngest child, Wesley.

Everyone you remember, where's his friend? Danny?

Oh?

Oh, Danny?

Hi a champ? How's it going well?

I get eight.

President that I'm doing pretty good? Okay. So it's very direct.

And I also think at that point, look at what was going on in the White House. No one was talking about AIDS, so you can bet that families weren't talking about it either.

It's true President Reagan didn't even mention AIDS in public until nineteen eighty five, four years into the epidemic.

Just having a conversation about this is usually when you think about what was going on in real life with Ryan White.

Ryan White was a hemophiliac teenager from Kocomo, Indiana, who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion and was banned from attending school.

It's a story we're hearing more and more often, a story marked by school boycotts and lawsuits and students like Ryan White manned from school because they have AIDS. Now, I think that such a serious issue is not the stuff of which situation comedies are made. Were but don't tell them, folks, who work on Mister Belvidere.

This episode aired in January of nineteen eighty six, and for a network television family show, it was pretty radical. For the writers, it was personal. They were inspired not only by the case of Ryan White, but also by their very own talent manager's loss. Her three year old son had died from AIDS after a blood transfusion. In the episode's final scene, Wesley stands up for Danny, who was not allowed to participate in a school pageant.

Is Daniel and Neion. He was supposed to play linkon but he couldn't because he's got AIDS.

Hey, oh, what are you doing out here?

Dennis?

Get away from him?

Hey, what's now with you people?

He's not going to hurt you.

I'm sorry. He feels bad enough forgot everybody trying to make him feel worse.

I have to say, like I was getting a little emotional. I felt a little burd in my nose watching that scene because adults were horrible, and you hear them in the audience saying get away from him, and then you hear this next generation saying no, you're being a nightmare and you're being a bigot.

And there's something powerful about that.

And I should point out that the actor who played the boy with aids is today a trans woman journalist at Axios and is very very proud of that episode and great that episode did.

Yeah, I think it is powerful and also not to be underestimated how much parenting was farmed out to network television.

The drama of very special episodes went done right required more nuanced performances. The best example maybe the nineteen eighty four Uncle Ned episode of Family Ties. In this scene, the lead character of Alex P. Keaton played by Michael J. Fox, encounters his alcoholic uncle Ned in the kitchen in the middle of the night. You'll probably recognize the voice, so the actor playing Uncle Ned.

Oh oh, oh oh, here we go.

Now it may not be million time, but it is vanilla time. Looking at you, kid. Now, remember, don't drive and bake.

I don't believe this. You'd just strike a whole bottle of vanilla extract.

And so who is it? Very famous actor.

Tom Hanks as Uncle Ned in like, by the way, the tightest jeans ever.

Wow, those are tight. Well, first of all, maybe I should know this does vanilla extract have alcohol?

I think it does?

Oh it does? Okay, you know, when I first saw this a couple of years ago, many years after it aired, I thought, oh, I'm going to watch something really, really laughable. But of course Tom Hanks is so good that he pulls it off.

Yes, absolutely, I mean that line, don't drive in bake.

It's a good come line.

But yeah, he's so good, and he's so funny, and he's so charming.

This storyline feels organic.

Towards the end of the episode, a drunk uncle Ned blows a job interview and Alex tries to remind him of his successful past. Then, in a pretty shocking scene, Ned backhands his nephew across the face. Hey give me, leave me alone.

Give me lave me alone. What the hell are you, Joyce?

I don't know, I don't know.

I'm sorry.

Sorry.

The Keaton family gives Ned an ultimatum, call AA or get out. Ned calls AA, and we never see him again. Like all Very Special episodes, everything is resolved five years later. A nineteen eighty nine episode of Growing Pains addressed drinking and driving, younger sister Carol finds out her boyfriend Sandy was in a car accident. Sandy is played by another soon to be famous actor.

What happened last night?

Well, this big tree ran right out in front of me, and I'm gonna be charged with drunk driving.

I don't understand.

I mean, it's not like we had that much to drink.

I know.

I mean there's been plenty of times I put away a lot more than that.

Nothing happened.

I guess I just ran out of luck last.

Night, Are you kidding?

I mean, when you think of what could have happened, you were really lucky.

And so that is Chacy Gold who plays the daughter Carol, who's an honor student, so she's usually you know, goody two shoes, I guess. And that's her boyfriend, played by Matthew Perry. Right, so it takes on a whole other layer of sadness. Let's see how it resolves.

Carol Sandy just died. Oh my god, he said just a few minutes.

Michael Seer, that is the second joke that I have ever heard.

I'm never gonna forgive you.

Now. I went earlier and I looked this is obviously on scientific but I looked at comments on YouTube. There's no snark. There are all these comments about how powerful this episode was and what a difference.

It made what happened to his second chance, what I happened to his second chance?

Yeah, and this is one of the episodes that people look to and they say, oh, this stopped me, or this allowed me to talk to my kid about drunk driving, or this stopped me from having a drink before getting behind a wheel.

And I have to say, just the very idea of.

What happened to his second chance is so profound, and it's so simple.

It's nothing.

It's one line, you know, and it says everything you want to say, as opposed to some of these other very special episodes that are like, well, you know, there's so much verbiage there.

Jeez. That's such a great point because this seems to me like the kind of thing a parent tries to impress on a child, and it's really hard to get a child to accept that there's not always a second chance.

Yes, because kids think they're invincible. And so when you hear another kid almost being like I don't understand, it goes right there and it's so understandable and relatable.

You were saying a lot of these very special episodes were doing parenting for parents, but here something that a parent would say to a child is actually dramatized pretty effectively.

And better in some ways. I think there were conversations that parents should have had with children. I have two kids, two teenagers now, and there are things that they will learn in a way that they will listen to more. Their ears will open more if they hear it from someone their age, if they hear it, you know, coming from culture rather than from their mother.

And this is one of those examples.

By the way, you interviewed Matthew Perry, right.

I did for his memoir, and then watching this watching him play someone who's using alcohol and then who dies, I don't know, it kind.

Of takes your breath away a little, and you know, people keep saying it. But in that earlier scene he is really good.

I mean, he was a good actor.

He could deliver a line, he had great timing, and in that moment you can see that he had the potential to play a little bit of drama too.

Now, a lot of the shows we've been talking about featured suburban white families, but in the eighties and nineties, many millions of viewers were watching black families on the Cosby show, Family Matters and The Fresh Prince of bel Air.

Now this is the story all about him. Well, I'd got twins ferns upside down and I'd like to take a manager said, right then, I'll tell you how it became the prince of a town called bell Air.

Okay, so this is a very special episode from The Fresh Prince of bel Air. It aired in nineteen ninety. Okay, so over thirty years ago. Will Smith's character and his cousin Carlton the wonderful Alfonso Rovero driving in a fancy car to Palm Springs and getting stopped by a cop vehicle registration. Please just a second, But the thing is, officer, this isn't my car.

Get out of the car, Carlon what he's gonna tell us to get out of the car?

You watch too much TV?

Will get out of the car, officer.

Honestly, I don't see the need to get.

Out of the car now. Okay. So then they're basically booked into a precinct and then they're released, and then there's this discussion which is really interesting between the Will and Carlton characters. Were attained for a few hours.

Dad planned things up, and we were released.

The system works.

I hope you like that system because you want to be seeing a whole lot of during your lifetime, not if.

I bring a map.

You just don't get it, do you. No map is going to save you. Neither's your glee club or your fancy bel air address or who your daddy is, because when you're driving in a nice car in a strange neighborhood, none of that matters.

They only see one thing.

Just the fact that this is still happening. And you know, could have beared last week and people would have said, oh, this is so timely, is its own tragedy. But it's so fascinating that scene and how the writers go right there.

It really is.

And part of what's also interesting, And look, there's a kind of subtlety of sophistication happening between those two characters. Right they don't introduce a white bagot character who has the conversation with Will. Will and his cousin who's also black, are having this disagreement over it, and somehow it seems to have more impact that way.

Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's a really interesting scene.

A conversation between two black characters about racism. The Very Special episode had come a long way since the groundbreaking Bewitched episode of twenty years before. But by the end of the nineteen nineties, the very special episode was dead. What killed it?

I think audiences became kind of too hip to what was going on.

That's next, Jesse.

Those pills are dangerous.

Yeah, it was, sois geometry.

You told me you were going to stop taking them.

I need them to stay awake and study.

Okay, this is saved by the Bell. This is an episode about caffeine pills. It's sort of like when people don't want to say Kleenex, they say facial tissue. They didn't want to use the brand name Nodos here, right, so instead they're talking about caffeine pills.

Anything would be okay. I just need one of these pills.

And so this is Elizabeth Berkeley's carearacter Jesse, and she's turned to caffeine pills to keep up with her studies and her new singing group, which is called Hot Sunday. I mean, you really are taking drugs.

You need them, say, Jessee, you can't sing the night you cat.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited scared. Well, first of all, do you think they had to pay for the rights? Did she sing enough of the Pointer Sister song that they had to pay for it.

I hope, so they should be paying for something. It's super subtle. I love when she's like digging around.

She's like pails pills.

It's no one ever acted that way about nosing their lives exactly.

I was a Jolt Cola person if I needed to finish a paper, but I don't remember getting that excited. To be fair, producers had originally wanted the substance Jesse was taking to be speed, but the network wouldn't allow it. The nineteen ninety caffeine pills episode of Saved by the Bell was so memorable it was parodied twenty five years later on Family Guy.

You actually are taking drugs, Stuet, give me those the contact.

I need them to sing.

I'm so excited, I'm so excited, so scared.

Screech is going to stab someone on Christmas.

But even by nineteen ninety four, when the movie Reality Bites came out, the very notion that a sitcom bore any meaningful resemblance to real life was sadly by gone.

I just don't.

Understand why things just can't go back to normal.

At the end of the half hour, like on The Brady Bunch or something.

Well, because mister Brady died of aides and for most kids growing up in the late nineties and early two thousand's family, our TV seemed alien.

First of all, the idea that your parents would sanction your TV watching was donzo, forget about it. I'm watching the show I want to watch for me. You don't need to know what I'm watching. And so that stamp of parental approval of like, we're going to have a conversation that adults are going to spoon feed to you kind of in your language, but kind of not, there was a generation of kids who are like, no, we don't do that anymore.

Right, I don't need to be introduced to this topic on my favorite sitcom?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and just the entire tone of sitcoms changed.

If there was any one sitcom that marked the death knell for the very special episode.

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld would come along saying basically, there are going to be no very special episodes.

That is the very thing that we will never do.

I mean, what was the quote, no hugging, no learning, No hugging no learning, right, So Seinfeld is a series was a stand against everything that the very Special episode stood for.

Yeah, there will be zero issues, and even in the show within the show, that show was also about nothing.

Well, what's the show about?

It's about nothing?

No story?

Forget the story.

You gotta have a story?

Who says you gotta have a story. Remember when we were waiting for that table in that Chinese restaurant that time? That could be a TV show?

How many levels of smart?

I mean, it's just it's so so great and thank god, I mean truly, can you imagine if they tried to tackle an issue.

Of course, plenty of new series did take on topics that were new to sitcoms, but instead of these being handled by ancillary characters in one off episodes, they became part of the fabric of the series itself. Take Will and Grace, what decades earlier might have been a very special episode about an out gay man living with his

Yeah or even a show like My Crazy Ex Girlfriend, I mean talking about mental health.

Forget it.

I mean, can you imagine it's sitcom in the eighties talking about mental health.

No, that wouldn't happen today. The term very special episode is so by gone. It's quaint, used almost endearingly here on the ABC sitcom Abbot Elementary.

Okay, if you guys are finished with this very special episode.

The very special episode could be pretty corny. And let's face it, there's only so much any kind of sitcom can do to a us some real world problems. When Quinta Brunson, the creator and star of Abbott Elementary, was asked by fans to consider a school shooting storyline, she suggested they use that energy to demand more from lawmakers. And yet there's also something to be said about a time when families were more likely to watch together and

I mean, yeah, and Tracy Gold is really good in that scene. I agree with you there intense and they're dealing with complex and profound feeling.

In the best way that they can in the format.

Yes, and in a way that somehow works.

And of course not almost it comes had very special episodes. There was never a very special episode of Three's Company, right, yeah, I mean what would that have been about? Like about rent Control?

I feel like something could have happened with the roper. That was a very special episode waiting to happen.

A Mumoo accident, for sure.

It was flammable and the house burned down. Right, let's explore homelesses.

I certainly hope you enjoyed this Mobituary. May I ask you to please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter at Morocca. Here are all new episodes of Mobituaries every Wednesday. Wherever you get your podcasts and check out Mobituaries Eight Lives Worth Reliving, the New York Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook. It includes