I know MJF was the " star " of family ties and no doubt he is a brilliant actor and perfect comedic timing but I always thought Michael Gross was awesome and his timing and facial expressions were underrated.
@@hutch1197 when you think about it Fox was a Full On Live Action Cartoon, I mean a Young Republican? Etc. And Mom and Dad were cartoonish, too, great expressions. But Mallory was Real like people you really knew or wish you knew💜
The whole scene was hilarious. Steven's wink, Alex's comments, Mallory kicking him and Nick. I loved it when Nick called Alex stiff. That's how Mike Flaherty from Spin City referred to him when his name was mentioned in the finale. Both played by Michael J Fox.
@0:54 Nick: This is really nice. Do you guys eat like this all the time? Alex: You mean with utensils? (Mallory kicks Alex under the table) ROTF LMBO!!!!😂😂😂😂😂
I always crushed on Mallory but Elise is so pretty, too, and all such great actresses! THAT GIRL is my new favorite TV character you'll love her she is not a mom but I must reccomend for beauty and charm and total hotness - I just discovered That Girl last year when Antenna TV started showing it but I've got some clips on my channel if you dont get that station - 253 on comcast of over the air next to Fox
I remember this episode like it was yesterday. They left out a bit of the last part of it. What happened after Mallory’s Dad asked Nick about being educated was the Dad and Nick had a small tug of war argument and Mallory got angry at her Dad and Alex about it. However there was a happy ending when Mallory’s parents eventually allowed her to continue dating Nick.
What's sort of strange about this whole thing is: the premise of the show is that the parents are former hippies, who ended up having a very conservative son (Alex.). Realistically they should have been THRILLED that Nick was an artist, given that part of the hippie aesthetic was celebration of art and creativity. That they sort of act like they don't 'get' Nick's interest in art is odd. However, IIRC correctly by this time the writers had forgotten the premise and made it all about Michael J. Fox, so maybe that's the explanation.
Yeah actually Nick was ahead of his time and they should have accepted his ideas more as they cherished their own hippie days. The whole concept was always a bit off to me. I dont know how old these parents are supposed to be in the show, but in real life, at the beginning of the series, Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross are 35 ...and Michael is 21. So they had him when they were 14? Michael Gross has said that his character only started getting substance when Nick joined. But I guess this was always more a Michael J Fox show, as he is always centre stage. I always liked Elyse and Mallory more.
It was one thing for Steven and Elyse to have had a generally favorable disposition towards art and creativity when they were in their 20s and living in a commune in (circa) 1968. It's another thing for them -- having rejoined society somewhere along the line and gotten regular jobs themselves -- to confront the fact that their daughter is going out with someone who is blowing off school (and likely has little earning potential) for the sake of his art. The show wasn't just about conservative Alex vs. his liberal parents. It was also about people who came of age in one era growing older and raising children in a very different one. Living in the real world -- and having children -- means making compromises and the show demonstrated the ways in which Steven and Elyse had had to make many. Part of the humor in this scene is, yes, the background hum of hypocrisy on Steven's part. The executive producer, Gary David Goldberg, and his wife, Diana Meehan, lived the hippy lifestyle in the U.S. and Europe for years before settling down in California. Goldberg said that, as originally conceived, the show was basically about their lives. (All of that changed, he said, when MJF became the breakout star and the show became much less focused on Steven and Elyse.) Steven's hypocrisy with respect to how he dealt with Nick was part of what Goldberg was exploring in this scene, I believe.
