Every Christmas Special I Watch This Year: That 70s Show: ‘Christmas’ (2003)

I’m not really that familiar with That 70s Show. It’s one of those sitcoms that I’ve never really seen a full episode of, yet still managed to run for about 20 seasons. Obviously, it’s set in the 70s, and it seems to focus around a group of adolescents all played by actors who never really made it in movies (Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Venom from Spiderman 3, the foreign girl from American Pie); and their parents, played by recognisable character actors (Kurtwood Smith, the older women who marries Pheobe’s sister in Friends).

For the Christmas episode, Mila Kunis gets kicked off the cheerleading team, so she makes all her friends (who are all a year older than her, and have therefore graduated) come to the Christmas dance on Christmas Eve so they she can get her place back (it’s sitcom logic, don’t think about it too much). Once there, they realise they get treated like gods by the current cool kids at the school because they’re ‘adults’, even though they were nerds when they were students. It’s a typical sitcom plot, and a nice riff on the real world after you leave school, but it also doesn’t really have anything to do with Christmas. It’s clearly another regular season episode that’s been awkwardly Christmasised. No school would have its dance on Christmas Fucking Eve.

They only element that actually requires a Christmas element is the B-plot, with dad Kurtwood Smith being roped into being a department store Santa. It’s pretty hackneyed, but it delivers one genuine laugh (Kurtwood Smith dress as Santa, telling a kid “That’s what Vietnam was really like”), which is more that I can say for the main plot. Prop though for adding sleigh bells into the theme music, and snowflakes and stuff. That shit will always get you far in my book.