Date of airing: November 16, 1996 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 17.7 million viewers, 11.3/20 in Households
This is how you write an episode involving a shooting and domestic violence without going too deep into the moral side of things, or getting too dark with the story. If you think about it a bit, this might be one of the better episodes of television in general because it wasn’t on either side of the political spectrum, even though both sides of the political spectrum of the story would have given you every chance in the world to be as partisan as possible and to deliver a splendid episode full of “morals of the story.” Guns were already an epidemic before it became a worldwide America-specific problem before this episode came to be in 1996, before the news hours were filled with images of the Columbine massacre, and Americans know it. They knew it back then and they know it now. The writers could have written an anti-gun episode here or at least went straight into the moral of the week of guns being a necessity, while still being an evil thing to have in your household.
And then the whole thing turned into a story about domestic violence instead of gun violence. ER always made a topic with a social commentary out of beaten wives, partners, and kids, and EARLY EDITION could have done the same: a dramatic story with an initial bad outcome. But because Gary Hobson is now officially a guardian angel, the show could have easily crossed over to TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL at one point (in fact, it’s quite easy now to have both shows set in the same universe, and both shows happened to be straight family entertainment), and the result is that everyone lives to see a happy end. Maybe even Kurt might have come to realize that his violent tendencies almost killed his kids. Will the almost-accident at the end of this episode have changed his life for the better?
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| This is the thanks Gary gets from Chicago for his help. |
Gary is getting into the thick of things. Now he’s even pretending to be someone he isn’t, just to be the guardian angel he is destined to be, making me wonder if the paper is actively changing Gary who he is as a person. Yes, the show only depicted a few minutes of Gary before he got the paper for the first time, but I would have loved to see who Gary was before, when he was still married, when he was still at his boring and disgusting tradings job, when he had no worries in the world because he knew he would get home at night and eat a delicious dinner, have wonderful sex with his wife, and maybe shy away from a talk about having kids in a few years. Now he gets the future a day in advance and because his morale is high up there, he decides to cut down on his life and help others. And now he has even gotten as far as creating an impromptu other personality, just so he can be around the fateful people from the beginning. Even if it means the writers had to employ some conveniences to have Gary in the lives of the people he saves.
However, it became noticeable how he didn’t even create the guidance counselor character himself – it was all about how Nikki perceived Gary, believing who he was because that’s who she needed him to be at this particular time in her life. If the episode had gotten a little deeper into Nikki’s emotional minefield of a world, maybe this hour would have been able to leave the familiar field of light drama and become a little PG-13-rated, due to the subject matter and somewhat mature content. Maybe EARLY EDITION wasn’t a family show just yet and because of the content of this episode, some viewers might have had a few minutes of worrisome feelings about what the episode could turn out to be, since it was promoted as a family show.
There was one impressive thing about this episode and it had to do with Tommy. The boy knew where the gun was, he knew what it was and what he could do with it, and he knew that his father was trouble. When Kurt came to the house the first time around, Tommy looked at him and ran immediately back upstairs, believing in an instant that he would be abused in a minute or two. And considering the thinking process inside Tommy’s mind, it must mean that Kurt was more than just the abusive husband who believed that his wife was taking his sons away from him. If a little kid like Tommy believes that his father is the devil, then you can believe the man was never loving and caring. And Tommy knew this much about his father, he knew the only thing that could help him was the gun. He even knew how to put bullets in it. When Tommy was shown with the gun for the first time, the scene turned out to be a WTF moment. When he was shown loading it with the bullets, it was yet another WTF moment. This kid has been traumatized, giving the story a whole different angle on domestic abuse, which was impressive and emotional to watch. It made the episode more important, and almost even timeless with its attempt at going into the premise. The gun epidemic and domestic violence are evergreen problems everywhere around the world. Which makes this episode an evergreen hour of television.
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| There's only one person here who deserves prison time. |
And finally, nice try, writers, but Chuck’s attempt at being friendly with the magic cat was nothing but a bore of a story. This episode is an example of how Gary’s friends are a bit of a pain in the ass in this stand-alone episodic drama, in which Gary is supposed to be the only one in the focus of the camera’s attention, but because the show also has two more characters, they have to get screentime as well. And then they get meaningless stories like Chuck giving a cat a flea bath. It wasn’t even working for the sake of comedy. But how else to give the character screentime when the entire series was supposed to be about Gary and his good deeds of saving lives?
