Ope Pardon, No. 17: As Seen on TV

The first time I was asked to explain Thanksgiving to a French person was in July.

At the time, I tried to stress that in the year of our lord 2022, we're not really celebrating or honoring anything historical anymore, and there is not even the pretext of a religious component, so it really is just a holiday about — as my friend explained to her French guests this weekend in a PowerPoint she had created for the occasion — food, family and football.

For many of the gathered French folk this weekend, it was their first Thanksgiving and, pre-PowerPoint, they good-naturedly joked about only knowing the holiday from pop culture. They meant it, not as a slight exactly, but as a self-deprecating acknowledgment that their image of Thanksgiving was probably inaccurate.

But I disagree.

For starters, let's consider their potential sources. When it comes to televisual representation, I always think of Thanksgiving as primarily a TV holiday. There aren't a ton of (modern) Thanksgiving movies, especially in comparison to Christmas — a holiday that shares the narrative set-ups of travel and family and dramatic dinners, but has the added bonus of global box office accessibility and aesthetically pleasing touches of snow and twinkle lights. Plus, (I'm guessing here) because of broadcast schedules back in the day, the need to come up with at least 22 stories per season and the way calendars work, most TV series traditionally produced Thanksgiving episodes.

Thus, statistically (I would imagine), a French person is more likely to see Thanksgiving in a TV series than a movie. Further, among the series they would (I would imagine) encounter, they are most likely to remember seeing Thanksgiving in a sitcom.

Procedurals exist primarily in their self-contained formulaic universes so while the police department or hospital may have some decorations and Thanksgiving may get a name-check here or there, those series typically don't take a break from their previously scheduled programming to serve as holiday emissaries.

Similarly, the nonsense (e.g., a turkey on someone's head) that foregrounds the holiday in your memory of a sitcom episode do not exist as prominently in dramas. For example, Succession has a Thanksgiving episode, but the main Thanksgiving-related differentiator from its other dinner-table-oriented episodes is the inclusion of a can of cranberries. (A notable exception in the drama genre here is, of course, This Is Us, which really went all in on owning Thanksgiving, to trademark devastating effect.)

Sitcoms, however, with their genre imperative for hijinks and low-stakes plots that can be resolved in 30 minutes, can really leverage the touchstones of Thanksgiving (food, family, football) to memorable (and educational) effect.

I, rather by happenstance, started a rewatch of New Girl this week — a series that produced a string of delightful Thanksgiving episodes — and, hearing the French talk about the holiday this week and weekend, it occurred to me that maybe in an abstract way, American sitcoms can actually teach you everything you need to know about Thanksgiving, particularly with respect to the pillar of family. (For food, there is simply no replacing the experience of eating the real thing.)

When I think about sitcom Thanksgiving episodes, I think (begrudgingly) of Friends, How I Met Your Mother and New Girl, primarily. While there are family-oriented sitcoms (Bob's Burgers, Modern Family) that have produced some great Thanksgiving episodes (consider Variety or Esquire's lists), the best sitcom Thanksgiving episodes do tend to skew toward the Friendsgiving variety — that is, Thanksgiving between friends.

Part of this follows simply from the fact that sitcoms have, over the last several decades, moved away from the nuclear home and family to be premised on friend groups and workplaces. In other words, from the traditional family to chosen or found family. Their depictions of Thanksgiving thus also changed to show more celebrations featuring that latter group. (Of course, there are exceptions and forebearers to everything and The Mary Tyler Moore Show would have you remember that "20-something living and working in the city finds family in neighbors and colleagues" is not something Gen X invented.)

I don't know when Friendsgiving first became a thing. Unlike "Galentine's Day," there is no singular cultural artifact to which we can trace the roots of the portmanteau. (Also, like Galentine's Day, I love the concept, but find the word incredibly cloying.) Merriam-Webster seems to credit the word Friendsgiving to the internet, generally, and Real Housewives of New Jersey (!), but makes a point to note that it has nothing to do with Friends, despite the show's several "Friendsgiving" episodes.

In any case, as someone who loves sitcoms and will likely not spend another Thanksgiving with my family for the foreseeable future, I am fond of the idea of the sitcom Friendsgiving as the cultural text disseminating Thanksgiving to the world.

That someone would receive an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner in Paris and arrive expecting low-stakes hijinks (pans that don't fit in ovens; wildcard guests), paralyzingly rich food and wine-amplified gratitude for found family seems perfectly accurate to me.

A series of thus-related anecdotes from this Thanksgiving in France:

• The Americans in attendance were allowed to curate their plates, but the (new) French were obliged to sample everything, but from what I could tell, it was clean-plate club all around.

• At the expense of the planet but in the interest of easy clean-up with no dishwasher, we used paper plates and really, truly tested their structural integrity.

• We had football playing, but out of deference to the guests, it was the France match and then the Argentina match, so I was relegated to watching Michigan carve up Ohio State like a turkey this (Sunday) morning — not ideal, but there are worse ways to start the day.

Go Blue.