With the holiday season a lot of adverts get a very Christmas-y feel and other television is no exception. While not strictly adhering to December, Christmas episodes are a staple in a long-running TV show, especially in a sitcom. Other similar themed episodes concern Halloween, Thanksgiving (in US and Canadian areas) and Valentine’s Day.
So, what exactly is a Christmas episode? Also known as a Christmas Special (mostly in the UK), the Christmas episode is a one-off seasonal episode of a series, most often appearing in comedies or dramedies, that is comedy dramas. Despite its name not many Christmas episodes actually appear on Christmas Day, but most of the shows aim for at least the holiday season.
Sometimes, Christmas episodes are tightly connected to the season, such as them being the last episode of the series (UK The Office and Only Fools and Horses), but more often than not, they are used to quickly and independently introduce significant changes in the show’s storyline, such as a birth or a wedding, without interrupting the flow of the show’s standard season. Thus, the show has an excuse to canonize the change in the next season.
One such example of separate Christmas episodes, or more appropriately, Christmas Specials, is the Doctor Who series, who with the relaunch of the series in 2005, started the tradition of a Doctor Who Christmas Special that a lot of people see. Interestingly enough, this year will be the first year without a Doctor Who Christmas Special, but it will be turned into a New Year’s Special instead. Some specials here continue from the season’s finale, and often are used to introduce the new incarnation of the Doctor .
Continuing with British Christmas Specials, in the 80s and 90s, there was a brief fad that these specials tied in with a Vacation Episode trope and had an episode in a very non-Christmassy location, such as the tropics, Florida, Australia (since December is the height of summer there), but that slowly reverted back to the standard home and hearth.
As for me, I detest trope-y episodes such as these and some other holiday-themed ones that I mentioned at the beginning. Unless they are well made, the show only plays on the tropes in hopes of getting higher viewer engagement and ratings. Most of the time, the show also uses them to lazily write in major changes that they had no idea how to include before. Take That 70’s Show for example. They had eight Christmas Episodes, one for each season. Which might not sound so bad, until you consider that the show was taking place over the course of four years, which makes eight Christmases sound a little excessive.