The best holiday TV is Halloween TV.
You might assume the best holiday TV is Christmas TV — you’ve been told this for years. But you’ve been told wrong. Christmas TV is frightening. Christmas TV is about dead parents and fiancees and Christmas in Santa Monica. There are dead parents and fiancees in Halloween TV, but they tend to be more lively, so to speak. Christmas TV is about young professionals who work too much and can’t appreciate the spirit of the holiday, not until their family is gathered around them, at which point they realize at last what’s meaningful in life. If a family is gathered around someone in Halloween TV, there is a solid chance they are deciding what tastes better — the left eye or the right shoulder.
Christmas TV gets a hushed reverence. Like the Oscar season it parallels, Christmas TV is chockablock with nostalgia and violently earnest reminders to have faith in mankind; it’s hidebound to insistent moral uplift, and genuflecting at a honey-glazed vision of the holidays that, depending on your tax bracket, is not particularly relatable. Christmas TV, by Dec. 24, becomes an unintentionally stressful yardstick, one that is expelled on Dec. 26 like spoiled turkey. Halloween TV, on the other hand, is playfully stressful, resistant to meaning, quite malleable and healthily self-scrutinizing.
Halloween TV is about allowing the people who make TV to blow off steam, if only for a single episode. It is a clandestine resume builder, a show-and-tell courtesy of the union set-decorating and costume-design departments — its craftspeople, restricted to a few prosaic situations for the other episodes that season, get inspired, absurdist and fantastical. For years I have been unable to resist any Halloween episode, no matter how ridiculous. If it’s a mediocre TV series, such as Fox’s “New Girl,” its Halloween episode is its best (Zooey Deschanel as “Zombie Woody Allen” is spot-on self-flagellation); if it’s smart, like NBC’s still-grieved “Community,” its Halloween episode underlines everything clever about the show. Truthfully, though, I like every Halloween episode of every show. And Halloween TV is older and more pervasive than you know.
In the 1950s, while trick-or-treating was still finding its footing in our postwar suburbs, “Lassie” delivered a Halloween episode with a sick dog and a witch. “The Andy Griffith Show” set a Halloween episode in a haunted house that Pennywise the Clown would have found inviting. There were Halloween episodes of “Law and Order” and “Lou Grant” and “M*A*S*H*”; there were six Halloween episodes of (the original) “Hawaii Five-O” and four Halloween episodes of “Dawson’s Creek.” There were Halloween episodes of “Gilligan’s Island.” Even “Star Trek.” There were Halloween episodes of “Saved by the Bell” and “Boy Meets World” about killers on the loose. If Christmas TV is about struggling to prove your worth to your kids (all they want is a mommy), Halloween TV is about four things: the haunted house on the block, the misunderstood Boo Radley everyone assumes is an ax murderer, the ghost in the attic, the kooky costume party.