The other day, I finally managed to catch Still, the documentary about Michael J Fox’s life and career, the last few decades of which have been affected by the increasingly debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. In many ways, the film is a nostalgia-fest, and of course, one of its main areas of focus is Family Ties, the sitcom that made Fox a household name. Watching it as a child, I didn’t appreciate the significance of the clashes between Fox’s character, the conservative, Reagan-loving Alex Keaton, and his hippie parents. But now, looking back, I can see precisely what the programme’s writers were up to and how astutely they’d managed to capture the mood of the times.
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