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DVD review: 'Family Ties: The Complete First Season'
We loathe the '80s
By Spencer Essey
sessey@mscd.edu

Family Ties: The Complete First Season 530 minutes $38.99

Syndication be damned! I want to watch my television in its original airdate order!

Somewhere, deep within the bowels of America comes this cry of the fanatic: those who simply cannot rest until their favorite television shows are available for purchase on DVD.

To answer this call, Paramount Pictures released the first season of Family Ties on DVD this week.
Family Ties, a show about ex-hippie parents, played by Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter, trying to raise an ultra-conservative son (Michael J. Fox), a consumerist daughter (Justine Bateman) and a tomboy (Tina Yothers) during the ’80s no longer seems relevant.

M*A*S*H, which revolutionized the serial drama and still runs more than 30 years later, warrants a DVD release. It dealt with issues that America still deals with today, so it remains within the mindset of the public.

For the Keatons, the only point of interest is vague banter regarding Reagan-era politics.

The four-disc set contains no special features, only the original 22 episodes from the premier season. Surprisingly, some of the episodes on these discs are edited because of copyright conflicts with the music, and Paramount’s unwillingness to shell out the dough.

Still, all the gems are here, albeit in edited form. Who could forget Alex Keaton’s coming-of-age conflict at the local country club, when his tattered, hippie dad shows up and embarrasses him? Who doesn’t sigh with sympathy when thinking of Mallory’s attempt to join the local sorority? Who doesn’t feel all fuzzy inside when recalling the Keatons’ first television Christmas, when they are stuck in the house and forced to reminisce? Someone, I suspect, who wasn’t reared in the ’80s.

Family Ties will join the sea of mostly unpurchased DVD series from the ’80s.

“Why did it take so long?” you might be asking, “I bought Charles in Charge and Growing Pains months ago.”

The truth is that the market for such memorabilia is not all that large, especially for shows like Family Ties.

It seems the studios aren’t chomping at the bit trying to get these shows to the public. It’s only when they realize whatever properties they have sitting around might bring in some revenue that they push out some shoddy package with no special features in the hopes of making a quick dollar.

Still, maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Instead of looking at it as studios releasing these outdated dinosaurs to the public just to make a quick insignificant buck, they should be marketing these series to the new generation of stay-at-home moms and dads as an alternative to the daytime TV courtroom circuses.

Now parents can buy these TV shows and play the DVDs all day long, imbuing their children with the wacky religious beliefs of Kirk Cameron and Growing Pains or even the Reagan jokes of Family Ties.

Maybe these DVDs are just offering new parents something our parents never had: a means to duplicate their childhood for their children.