Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today. Merry Christmas!
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is my favorite thing Walter Murphy composed. It surpasses, in my book, the instrumental he’s most famous for, the 1976 disco hit “A Fifth of Beethoven” (which surfaced a year later in Saturday Night Fever). It’s his theme from American Dad!, which first aired on Fox in 2005 and was exclusive to TBS from fall 2014 to last March.
Because of the end of TBS’s original programming department, American Dad! reverted back to being a Fox original series and will return to its old spot on Fox’s Sunday night “Animation Domination” schedule. Its first Fox episode since 2014’s “Blagsnarst, a Love Story” will premiere on February 22. American Dad! is the only Seth MacFarlane creation I like. I don’t care for Family Guy, I never saw any of the Ted movies or Peacock’s Ted TV series, and I never watched The Orville, even though a few Star Trek fans have pointed out that MacFarlane’s live-action space opera is a great homage to Michael Piller-era Trek, an era I watched when I was a teen and Galoob was making awesome Micro Machines of Starfleet vessels and Klingon Birds-of-Prey.
Murphy’s theme from American Dad! is represented today by the end title version.
“Does your family always have such messed-up Christmases?” asked simple-minded stoner Jeff Fischer, at the time the newest member of the Smith household, to reckless CIA agent Stan Smith, his father-in-law, at the end of “For Whom the Sleigh Bell Tolls,” American Dad!’s gory 2010 Christmas episode.
“Yeah, Jeff,” replied Stan, “and now you do, too.”
Over the course of 17 days, from December 3 to 19, I watched on Hulu all 14 of the Smiths’ messed-up Christmases so far. Prior to the three-week marathon, I had seen only three American Dad! Christmas episodes: 2009’s completely bonkers and, as Raven Wilder noted in 2024, Heavy Metal-style “Rapture’s Delight,” “For Whom the Sleigh Bell Tolls,” and 2013’s “Minstrel Krampus.”
I lost touch with American Dad! at some point after 2013’s “Steve and Snot’s Test-Tubular Adventure” (although I read about how great and eerie 2019’s “Rabbit Ears” was as an homage to the original Twilight Zone, so I caught that episode on Hulu in 2020). I didn’t get hooked on American Dad! again until I recently watched for the first time 2023’s “Fellow Traveler,” an episode-long flashback to Roger’s first few years on Earth and the first “family” that took him in long before he met the Smiths, and I thought, “Wow, these TBS-era episodes don’t suck.” That made me go watch all 14 dark-humored Christmas episodes in chronological order. (Not all of them work. “The Grounch” is pretty dire.)
I’m not doing a year-end “TV in 2025” thing for this last Couch Avocados column of the year. I’m not a TV critic. I don’t need to do that shit. If I were a critic, I would have hated doing the task of picking out the best and worst of the year anyway. I haven’t been watching current critical darlings like Pluribus (I don’t have the newly renamed Apple TV) or Crave and HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry (I don’t have HBO Max). I’ve been watching a vengeful, Bond villain-style Santa Claus try to kill the Smiths over the course of 14 seasons.
Many people in the American Dad! fanbase have felt that the Smiths’ feud with Santa (still voiced by former staffer and “Rapture’s Delight” co-writer Matt McKenna)—which began when Steve accidentally shot Claus multiple times with a machine gun in “For Whom the Sleigh Bell Tolls”—has worn thin. I’m a little more patient with “Evil Santa” episodes like 2024’s lukewarmly received “Nasty Christmas” than those folks are, but none of them are among my top five favorite American Dad! Christmas episodes.
None of my top five favorite episodes involve McKenna’s cigar-puffing Santa. “The Best Christmas Story Never Told,” the very first American Dad! Christmas episode (it first aired in 2006), involves time travel and a not-very-Christmassy plan by Stan to kill Jane Fonda on the set of Klute. “Rapture’s Delight”—which I first watched in 2014 during American Dad!’s run on Netflix, long before its move to Hulu—is about a Christmas Day rapture that results in both the Smiths’ hometown of Langley Falls, Virginia turning into a post-apocalyptic battle zone and the aforementioned Murphy channeling Tangerine Dream’s score from Sorcerer and John Carpenter’s score from Escape from New York. “Season’s Beatings” is an entertaining Omen parody. The nicely animated “Minstrel Krampus” centers on a Danny Glover-voiced Krampus, who starts out as Steve’s worst nightmare and ends up becoming his newest friend.
The Glover episode is a keeper because it spotlights the singing voices of both the late, great Charles Bradley and Scott Grimes. Bradley, whose performance of “Ain’t It a Sin” at Cottonmouth’s club is my favorite moment from Luke Cage’s “Who’s Gonna Take the Weight?” episode, provided Krampus’s singing voice whenever the punisher of naughty children did a musical number. The best moment in “Minstrel Krampus” is a duet between Bradley and Grimes. The Christmas episodes could use a lot more of Grimes’s spectacular singing voice because his voice whenever Steve sings a slow jam is always a highlight of American Dad!
And then there’s Maude “Yule. Tide. Repeat.” The episode traps Stan in a time loop while he tries to stop a shopping mall Christmas tree from exploding and killing his family and other mallgoers.
One of the funniest and goriest time loop stories ever made, 2020’s “Yule. Tide. Repeat.” is, hands down, my favorite TBS-era American Dad! Christmas episode.
Inspired by Edge of Tomorrow, “Yule. Tide. Repeat.” is one of the best examples of my favorite version of American Dad!: the version of the show after it drifted away from both MacFarlane’s original vision of Stan as Archie Bunker with grenades and MacFarlane’s use of Stan’s conservatism to sneak in some anti-Bush commentary. (The 2005 series premiere remains the only American Dad! episode with a writing credit for MacFarlane, even though he voices Stan, Roger, and Langley Falls anchorman Greg Corbin.) Under Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman, American Dad!’s showrunners from 2005 to 2013 (nowadays, Weitzman co-showruns American Dad! with Brian Boyle), Stan became more like Inspector Sledge Hammer, an apolitical weirdo who simply loves violence and mayhem.
I never got over the 1988 cancellation of Sledge Hammer! A single-camera sitcom I enjoyed when I was a kid, Sledge Hammer! was veteran script doctor Alan Spencer’s slapstick parody of the Dirty Harry franchise, Stephen J. Cannell’s Hunter, and whatever recent movie the writers wanted to emulate that week (my favorite Sledge Hammer! episode was a riff on Desperately Seeking Susan).
When it’s not focused on the multiple personas of Roger, whose popularity as an American Dad! character exceeded that of Stan’s, American Dad!, particularly in “Yule. Tide. Repeat.,” feels like the closest thing to the mayhem of Sledge Hammer! (However, there’s no Captain Trunk to put a stop to Stan’s recklessness.) Stan is basically Sledge if he became both a suburban dad and a 2D-animated character.
The changes to Stan and the decision by Barker and Weitzman to go all-in on Roger’s personas (“The great thing about Roger is, he’s basically our guest star of the week,” said Barker to then-A.V. Club TV critic Emily St. James in 2012) resulted in American Dad! becoming timeless and a lot more rewatchable.
“By focusing on Roger’s personas, the writers turned him into someone who is obsessed with stories—specifically the stories that he can create by pretending to be a completely different person—and that made American Dad!’s stories better as a whole,” wrote the A.V. Club’s Sam Barsanti in 2020.
Those early seasons when American Dad! was more like All in the Family for the Dubya era are rough. Stan was the Archie to Hayley’s Meathead (gods rest the soul of Rob Reiner, the only celebrity I got to meet in the San Jose office where I worked as a coder, and that day when I told him how much I enjoyed his Friars Club Roast—he said to me, “That roast was filthy”—interestingly took place in the interval between Rumor Has It… and The Bucket List, Reiner’s final smash hit as a director). When American Dad! became less like All in the Family, it got funnier—and stranger. The fact that one of its Christmas episodes is a horror time loop movie (while an even more unsentimental Christmas episode from eight seasons before is about a little boy Hayley adopts without realizing he’s the Antichrist) is Exhibit A in post-Dubya-era American Dad!’s appealing strangeness.
Exhibit B is Patrick Stewart receiving whatever strange line of dialogue the American Dad! writers throw at him and then batting it out of the park in the part he was born to play, baby: Deputy Director Avery Bullock. He’s as perfectly cast as Wendy Schaal—the virginal and youngest babe in the first season of It’s a Living and, later on, the babe in Joe Dante projects like Amazing Stories’s “Boo!” episode, Innerspace, and The ’Burbs—is as Francine, a twisted, murderous, and still-hot housewife straight out of “Boo!” or The ’Burbs.
Exhibit C is parodies of forgotten Tony! Toni! Toné! music videos.
Many folks like to watch a Hallmark or Lifetime Christmas movie. During the holiday season, I’d rather curl up to either a thief getting mistaken for an actor at a Christmastime audition for a private eye movie and then violently learning the ins and outs of being an actual P.I. or a butt-chinned and reckless CIA agent dying repeatedly in the most horrific ways on Christmas.
Fortunately, thanks to Fox, “Nasty Christmas” won’t be the last of the Smiths’ messed-up Christmases.