Talking turkey

Memorable Thanksgiving episodes, plus TV coaching trees, 'Blue Lights,' and more

Alan Sepinwall

21 Nov 2025 — 7 min read

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Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as, as God is my witness, I believe turkeys can fly...

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What's next?

Coming up in the next week or so, for paid subscribers:

Recaps of the penultimate episode of The Chair Company, and the fifth episode of Pluribus;
Spoiler thoughts on A Man on the Inside Season Two;
For people on the What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier, part two of my look at TV Shows That Don't Exist, this time focusing on notable shows that produced pilots (if not multiple episodes) that never aired; and
Thoughts on the first batch of new Stranger Things episodes.

Put me in, coach

In addition to everything I'm writing here, I've been doing some freelance writing for other outlets, like my Task essay for The New York Times, or my Matthew Macfadyen interview for Emmy magazine. This week, I wrote a column for The Ringer that tried to span the gap between the site's sports and entertainment sections, with a look at TV coaching trees: shows whose writing and/or directing staffs were filled with people who went on to run shows (or make movies) of their own:

I listed a few honorable mentions, and also acknowledged that some of the shows on the list either sprang from earlier trees or helped grow later trees, but I'm sure I missed some good ones. (The best one suggested to me on social media was The Dana Carvey Show, which gave early work to Charlie Kaufman, Stephen Colbert, and, well, Louis C.K., among others.) Fire away with your suggestions in the comments.

Peelers on patrol

A few weeks ago, a fellow TV critic asked if I had watched Blue Lights, a cop drama set in Northern Ireland, which some UK press had compared to The Wire. An hour after that, a publicist sent me a Blue Lights pitch, and then the next day, a friend mentioned it out of the, well, blue. At a certain point, when the cosmos is trying to tell you something — especially if you're currently at work on a book about The Wire — you have to listen. So I binged all three seasons (the third debuted last week on BritBox), and wound up enjoying it a lot, even if The Wire comparisons didn't quite materialize for me:

At the same time, the Season Three key art looks less like it's selling a gritty cop show than a Reno 911-esque parody of one. It's far from the worst of its kind — never, ever, forget the Night Shift key art — but it definitely misses the mark.

Catching up

In addition to the pieces linked to above, here's the other stuff I wrote this week:

I had a long, wide-ranging conversation with Long Story Short creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg about his terrific Netflix animated comedy. Topics included how TV usually depicts Jewish-American characters, and how he wanted to approach that; how, with shows like this and BoJack Horseman, he figures out how to balance ridiculous comedy with heavier material; and how he has to approach structuring a series in a very different streaming economy from the one that allowed BoJack to have 76 episodes over six seasons. It was a very good chat:

I recapped the sixth episode of The Chair Company, which dialed back the weirdness from the previous installment, but still had plenty of oddity to offer:

And I recapped this week's Pluribus, which introduced a notable new character and saw Carol trying to learn more about what the Others will and won't do:

You get a renewal! And you get a renewal! Everybody gets a renewal!

HBO made a bunch of renewal announcements yesterday, ordering new seasons of I Love L.A. (which I'm still waiting to watch until a bunch of episodes have piled up), House of the Dragon and A Night of the Seven Kingdoms (which debuts next year), Task, and The Chair Company. The latter two aren't exactly surprising, since HBO already decided to submit Task as a drama at the Emmys, rather than a limited series. I'm still curious how it will work. Mark Ruffalo is returning, but his character already achieved catharsis on his traumas, so will it now be a more straightforward cop show? The Chair Company (which I've been recapping) has clearly struck a chord with viewers, and my guess is that Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin knew going in that the story wouldn't end with this season. But as much as I'm enjoying it, I wonder how long they can keep this story going.

Giving thanks

Halloween and Christmas are the two most common settings for TV holiday episodes. But as Thanksgiving approaches, it's worth noting that there have been some absolute classics set on Turkey Day. Here are a few of my favorites:

"Thanksgiving Orphans," from the fifth season of Cheers, is often held up as the best Thanksgiving episode of all, and one of the great sitcom episodes, period. There are Cheers eps I prefer, like "Endless Slumper" or "Showdown," because they're more specific to these characters. But you can't watch the "Thanksgiving Orphans" food fight scene and not be filled with happiness:

Friends made Thanksgiving an annual event, and there are lots of options to choose from there. (My wife and I still quote the argument about the keys from "The One Where Underdog Gets Away.") But the sight gag of Joey with the turkey stuck on his head in Season Five's "The One With All the Thanksgivings" is hard to top:

Even more than Friends, The O.C. turned the idea of holidays into the show's own franchise — a way to generate stories without any of the characters having plot-relevant jobs. Chrismukkah was the show's most famous invention, but it tended to nail Thanksgiving as well, as explained here by Seth Cohen:

Where broadcast network shows try to stay close to the calendar, so that Thanksgiving episodes air in mid-late November, The Sopranos could do whatever it wanted, including running a Thanksgiving episode, Season Three's "He Is Risen" — which introduces Janice's narcoleptic, born again boyfriend Aaron Arkaway — in April.

Finally, while Mad Men spent some time depicting actual Thanksgiving dinners, its most memorable Thanksgiving-adjacent episode had Don trying to complete a pitch right before he went to join Betty and the kids to spend the holiday with her family:

That said, not every Turkey Day classic has aged perfectly. The WKRP in Cincinnati episode with the station's disastrous Thanksgiving promotion — long held up as one of the funniest gags in sitcom history — played to stony silence when I recently tried introducing it to my family. (And keep in mind that they love plenty of comedies of similar vintage, like the aforementioned Cheers.)