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Diagnosis Murder
I was browsing a fandom meme where people were talking about their favorite Christmas specials/episodes, which reminded me of one of my own favorites: the episode of Diagnosis Murder (the tv show where Dick Van Dyke played a doctor who solves murders) in which Dr. Sloan's estranged daughter comes home near Christmas seeking shelter from her abusive husband.
The doc welcomes her, but police detective son Steve isn't ready to forgive her for abandoning the family years ago. However, when her life is put in danger because of some shady business her husband was involved in, Steve sets aside past grudges to rescue his sister, and the Sloan family celebrates a merry Christmas together by the end of the episode.
Diagnosis Murder is one of my favorite feel-good TV shows. The basic premise (crime solving doctor!) is pretty silly, but Dick Van Dyke is charming and funny enough that it's easy to handwave, and I love the humor and the warm relationships between Doc Sloan and his son, and between Sloan and his friends at the hospital. And that Christmas episode was one of my all-time favorites: the plot with the daughter/sister had just the right touch of angst to appeal to me (and interestingly enough, showed that the seemingly perfect Sloan family wasn't quite so perfect after all), with the requisite happy ending making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
So I did a bit of googling and discovered that the episode ("Murder in the Family") took place in the first half of Season 4, so I went to Amazon to see if I could order it on dvd. Well, Amazon has everything except Season 4, Part 1! (The dvds for that season are split up into two parts.) The only way to get it would be to order the complete collection box set for $160, which I actually might have done if I didn't already have Seasons 1-3 on dvd already--I really don't want to pay that much to get 3 seasons worth of duplicates. Ah, but then I remembered that I had taped that episode years ago on TV and was sure I had still had the tape packed away somewhere in my closet. Unfortunately, my closet is jam-packed with boxes of old books and magazines and dvds (not in any particular order, of course), and I spent half the morning looking for it and still couldn't find it. So no Diagnosis Murder Christmas episode for me! :-(
I also checked Barnes & Noble, Netflix, and iTunes, but they don't have it, either. A web search for online videos struck out, too. The best I could do was sign up for an email alert if/when the dvd set becomes available on Amazon, but it probably won't come in before Christmas. It had a scheduled release date of this past summer, so I'm not sure why it's out of stock (or delayed?) when Part 2 is available.
Argh, so that was really frustrating! On the other hand, I did find some other videos and some manga that I had misplaced, so at least my closet excavation wasn't completely wasted. In particular, Stolen Hearts, a really sweet (and sadly, out of print) shoujo manga from CMX about a girl who falls in love with the scary-looking (but kind-hearted) boy whose family runs a kimono shop. And also vol. 1 of Loveholic (a yaoi manga about a romance between a temperamental photographer and the composed, stylish, and efficient manager of an advertising company)--I had bought vol. 2, but was holding off on reading it until I could read vol. 1 again.
The rest of the day was spent fruitfully, baking chocolate chip and sugar cookies as my annual Christmas gift to my coworkers. ^_^
(Getting back to Diagnosis Murder, another favorite episode is the one where Jesse finds out that his dad is actually a spy--it has some of the actors from Mission Impossible as guest stars. One of the things that I liked about Jesse was how he kind of looked up to Sloan as a father figure, since he didn't have a good relationship with his own dad. In the spy episode, he finds out the reason why his father was never around for him as a kid was because he was carrying out secret missions for the government, and he's finally able to reconcile with his dad. I guess that family angst as well as romance angst appeals to me--at least the fictional sort, since I can do without any RL family angst.)
The doc welcomes her, but police detective son Steve isn't ready to forgive her for abandoning the family years ago. However, when her life is put in danger because of some shady business her husband was involved in, Steve sets aside past grudges to rescue his sister, and the Sloan family celebrates a merry Christmas together by the end of the episode.
Diagnosis Murder is one of my favorite feel-good TV shows. The basic premise (crime solving doctor!) is pretty silly, but Dick Van Dyke is charming and funny enough that it's easy to handwave, and I love the humor and the warm relationships between Doc Sloan and his son, and between Sloan and his friends at the hospital. And that Christmas episode was one of my all-time favorites: the plot with the daughter/sister had just the right touch of angst to appeal to me (and interestingly enough, showed that the seemingly perfect Sloan family wasn't quite so perfect after all), with the requisite happy ending making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
So I did a bit of googling and discovered that the episode ("Murder in the Family") took place in the first half of Season 4, so I went to Amazon to see if I could order it on dvd. Well, Amazon has everything except Season 4, Part 1! (The dvds for that season are split up into two parts.) The only way to get it would be to order the complete collection box set for $160, which I actually might have done if I didn't already have Seasons 1-3 on dvd already--I really don't want to pay that much to get 3 seasons worth of duplicates. Ah, but then I remembered that I had taped that episode years ago on TV and was sure I had still had the tape packed away somewhere in my closet. Unfortunately, my closet is jam-packed with boxes of old books and magazines and dvds (not in any particular order, of course), and I spent half the morning looking for it and still couldn't find it. So no Diagnosis Murder Christmas episode for me! :-(
I also checked Barnes & Noble, Netflix, and iTunes, but they don't have it, either. A web search for online videos struck out, too. The best I could do was sign up for an email alert if/when the dvd set becomes available on Amazon, but it probably won't come in before Christmas. It had a scheduled release date of this past summer, so I'm not sure why it's out of stock (or delayed?) when Part 2 is available.
Argh, so that was really frustrating! On the other hand, I did find some other videos and some manga that I had misplaced, so at least my closet excavation wasn't completely wasted. In particular, Stolen Hearts, a really sweet (and sadly, out of print) shoujo manga from CMX about a girl who falls in love with the scary-looking (but kind-hearted) boy whose family runs a kimono shop. And also vol. 1 of Loveholic (a yaoi manga about a romance between a temperamental photographer and the composed, stylish, and efficient manager of an advertising company)--I had bought vol. 2, but was holding off on reading it until I could read vol. 1 again.
The rest of the day was spent fruitfully, baking chocolate chip and sugar cookies as my annual Christmas gift to my coworkers. ^_^
(Getting back to Diagnosis Murder, another favorite episode is the one where Jesse finds out that his dad is actually a spy--it has some of the actors from Mission Impossible as guest stars. One of the things that I liked about Jesse was how he kind of looked up to Sloan as a father figure, since he didn't have a good relationship with his own dad. In the spy episode, he finds out the reason why his father was never around for him as a kid was because he was carrying out secret missions for the government, and he's finally able to reconcile with his dad. I guess that family angst as well as romance angst appeals to me--at least the fictional sort, since I can do without any RL family angst.)