‘Cheers’ Has The Greatest (And Messiest) Thanksgiving Episode Of All Time

The holidays are hard. There’s too much cooking, too much spending, too little privacy, and too much pressure to make sure everything goes just right. The holidays can also be great, with the love of family and close friends surrounding you in its most concentrated form. The holidays ask you to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time if you’re gonna get anything useful out of them. They are both horrible and wonderful, and trying to make them strictly one or the other is a surefire recipe for disaster.

That’s why holiday sitcom episodes, specifically ones celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas, are so special. The sitcom formula necessitates that things go wrong (that’s the horrible part of the holidays), but the formula also needs for things to end up okay (and there’s the great part). These episodes, like the Thanksgiving ones Friends and New Girl knocked out of the park year after year, get how stressful the season is but also how rewarding it can be. And when it comes to showing the joyful mess of the most thank-filled day of the year, no sitcom episode does it better than Cheers’ “Thanksgiving Orphans.”

Written by Cheri Eichen and Bill Steinkellner and directed by multi-cam master James Burrows, “Thanksgiving Orphans” is a delicious sitcom turkey stuffed with the holiday spirit. It checks off all the holiday boxes while also saying something really profound about family–and there are also a dozen or more A+ jokes that hold up 31 Thanksgivings later.

As the title implies, this Cheers episode brings the entire cast together for a holiday dinner after they all realize they have nowhere else to go. Carla’s (Rhea Perlman) kids are with their father, Frasier’s (Kelsey Grammer) alone and bitter, Cliff’s (John Ratzenberger) mom is volunteering at the rescue mission, and Woody’s (Woody Harrelson) spending his first Thanksgiving away from home (if you don’t count last year). Others have a place to be (Sam has a date on Thanksgiving!), but they would rather spend the day with their friends. Norm (George Wendt) just wants to get away from his in-laws’ no-fun-zone (there’s no beer, no TV and the heat is turned up to 80). Diane (Shelley Long), excited that she’s been invited to spend the holiday with a stuffy professor she’s keen on impressing, suggests that Carla host dinner for everyone else. Carla obliges, even allowing her archenemy Cliff to come over for yams (so long as he never tells anyone).

Plenty of sitcoms focus on friends and found families, and those resonate with me way more than any of the TGIF shows. But Cheers feels different from, say, Friends. The characters in Cheers really don’t have anything in common outside of a place, whereas most of the Friends are lifelong buds and, in some cases, literal family. Would Woody and Carla ever hang out were it not for this bar? Or Frasier and Norm, or Cliff and Diane? The characters of Cheers are bonded together by a place. They’re a subtly disparate bunch, a fact you don’t consider until they’re off their common ground. And just like IRL Thanksgivings, this episode, plucks everyone out of their comfort zone and drops them in a new context: Carla’s house.

Once the episode relocates, the characters start to slowly fall into a familial rhythm. Carla plays host in her own aggressive way while her guests sit on the couch and alternate between football games and the parade. There’s even a moment where Cliff musses a wonder-filled Woody’s hair, a fatherly gesture between two men that are usually bartender and patron.

Now that they’re spending a holiday together, these characters are connecting. Woody even asks “Who needs family?” Frasier responds with the episode’s entire thesis, stating that family is more than just blood relations. That proves to be true as the rest of the cast shows up, having been abandoned by their plans. Norm couldn’t convince Vera to come to Carla’s, even though he said this was important to him. Sam (Ted Danson) shows up stag because his date’s sister showed up in town (and they weren’t into his suggestion of how to spend Thanksgiving). They’re welcomed into Carla’s house and immediately start drinking beer and subconsciously fighting over the TV–and then this makeshift family’s “nutty old aunt” shows up.

Every family has a Diane, a person that is a bit of a stickler for tradition and, even worse, can’t relax. Diane represents everything that’s grating about Thanksgiving, and she’s dressed like a pilgrim just to highlight the point. The rest of the cast can chill together–even Frasier, who chooses to just move to where he can see the TV instead of shouting at Sam and Norm to stop moving it. Frasier can hang, but Diane… Diane cannot hang.  She spent the whole first act gloating about her fancy schmancy dinner! But while Diane won’t acknowledge it, she’s no better than Sam, Norm, and the rest. Her plans fell through, too, when her professor handed her a serving tray and expected her to be his hired help. Ouch!

Even though Carla tried to crack one of Diane’s ribs with a slamming door, the rest of the gang recognizes Diane as another Thanksgiving orphan. That doesn’t mean she fits in. Diane won’t let them eat anything until the turkey is done, even though the “pop thing” is nowhere close to popping. To pass the time, Diane insists everyone take turns saying what they’re thankful for. Sam’s thankful for his car and stereo, and Woody’s thankful that his tongue can do this:

None of this is serious enough for Diane, who takes over the circle-of-thanks to show gratitude towards her idols (including Caravaggio, Emily Dickinson, and Shari Lewis and Lambchop). What the consistently oblivious Diane fails to recognize is that she’s put the rest of the cast in a vice grip. And the fact that they’ve been filling empty stomachs with beer and Cliff’s stale popcorn balls all day has them on edge. Passive-aggressive remarks about gravy skin and cold carrots leads to an inciting incident: Norm flicks a pea at Carla. And suddenly…

That’s the central conflict not only in this episode, but in all family Thanksgivings. There’s one person trying to hold everything together, trying to build the perfect Thanksgiving but not realizing they’re trying to stabilize a picked-over Jenga tower. Diane’s attempt to maintain order doesn’t work, as Sam chucks a handful of cranberries at Diane, staining her pristine pilgrim getup.

And then, after all that tension, there’s the eruption.

This is why this episode is great, and I’d even say that this food fight is beautiful. Okay, it’s not literally beautiful, as my orderly side finds food fights deeply upsetting. It’s beautiful because of what it symbolizes. Thanksgiving isn’t about a perfect dinner. It’s about the people, and therefore the dinner is what the people make of it, and therefore it has to be as imperfect and messy as those seated at the table. And none of that is bad! This food fight, it’s the Cheers gang being themselves and finally acknowledging just how dysfunctional they all are. Sam throwing cranberries at Diane wasn’t malicious, it was Sam saying, “Hey, you’re an orphan too, you’re one of us, and we–including you–are going to let loose.” And Sam was right, because Diane responds by shouting “Kiss your butt goodbye!” and launching an attack.

The most comfortable part of the episode happens after this chaotic dinner brawl. The seven of them all sit around the table, covered in cold food but radiating warmth. They’ve acknowledged the messiness of their relationships, and now they’re closer than ever. That’s why their toasts to absent family members go better than the previous round of thanks. Woody toasts to his family, Carla toasts to her kids, and Sam–the guy that previously thanked his car speakers–makes the most sincere toast of all.

It’s an emotionally honest moment, seeing these characters and this cast toasting a character and actor who passed away just a few years prior. There’s no joke here, and the show moves past it without turning it into a flashback montage. This toast, which comes after one of the broadest bits of physical comedy in the show’s history, is perfect. It feels true, it feels right, it fits the show, it fits the holiday.

The episode ends with Vera, Norm’s always off-camera wife, showing up on the show for the first and only time. Diane’s playful vendetta against Sam leads her to chuck a pie at him–and he ducks, causing it to smack Vera in the face. The only time we see Vera, her face is a pie. This gag plays into the food fight metaphor, as Vera does not take too kindly to being decked in the face with dessert. She’s not part of Norm’s food fight family.

Some Thanksgiving sitcom episodes pack in the references, and others serve heartwarming tales of families coming together. “Thanksgiving Orphans” does all that while also allowing its characters to wallow in the holiday mess and, most importantly, come out the other side closer than ever, totally free of oppressive expectations. They’re covered in filth, and they all still love each other. That’s all you need on Thanksgiving.

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