The Michael J Fox Show (Thurs. 8:00) is not the good show. It also is not, however, bad in any way. The premise is that Fox plays an ex-news anchor named Mike Henry who had to quit his job due to his Parkinson’s disease. If you’re thinking that the show is maudlin or manipulative in any way, the show is well aware. In fact, more or less the entire pilot is about how sick Henry’s entire family is of everyone’s sympathy, and the writing is refreshingly unblinking at its central subject. Mike tries to scoop some eggs for his wife without spilling any as his hand shakes, and she waits patiently, only to follow it with, “Jesus, can you not have a personal triumph right now? We’re starving.” Likewise, Mike’s kids deal with the ins and outs of being the children of a Parkinson’s victim in creative ways. One scene has his daughter coming to school, the teacher taking an extra moment after taking attendance to ask, “Are you okay?” “Fine,” she responds nonchalantly. “Are you?” he asks again, as everyone stares at her, and all she can do is roll her eyes at the callousness of the people she’s surrounded by.
She realizes, as any kid would, that this situation is a potential goldmine, and decides not to do the assigned reading of The Grapes of Wrath, instead making an over-the-top Hallmark-style video of her dad (“Parkinson’s is his personal dust bowl”). The teacher gives her an F, calling it manipulative, and she shrugs incredulously as her own song parody of Enrique Iglesias’s “Hero” plays on the tape.
This is all great stuff, and, as I said, kind of a miracle considering that they’re trying to make Fox’s real-life disease into so much farce. The only question is where the show is going to take it from here. It could go either way. One path—one I hope they don’t go down—would be to simply hammer these jokes into the ground over and over and over again, the way Will & Grace used to do with gay jokes: they knew they had something innovative, and they played their one-joke premise for all it was worth. Another direction they could go in is one that Mike Henry himself worries about in episode one: he doesn’t want NBC to turn his return to TV into a weepie personal victory “in slo-mo with soft music playing in the background.” While MJFS wants to be too hip to stoop to that level, it comes dangerously close to it, especially in the last few minutes. Like Modern Family, it soft-pedals everything that happened in its first twenty minutes by abandoning the jokes in the final two, with annoying voiceover summings-up of the proceedings, and, yes, inspirational soft music playing over the final shot.
What I hope it ends up doing is simply moving on from the Parkinson’s thing altogether. Fox is and has always been a charming actor, and it may sound trite but the disease by no means defines who he is, and neither should it define the show. The writing is strong enough in its non-Parkinsonian moments to prove that it can go elsewhere if it wants: Mike’s sister stops over and smells something he’s cooking in the kitchen, and when she guesses it, she says, “Oh my god, enough with the kale. We get it. You’re white.”
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.