Michael J. Fox

Family Ties put Fox at young-star voltage: Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross as the counterculture parents, Alex as the kid who voted the other way. Family multi-cam that engages 1980s politics without becoming a lecture. Scheduling-war gossip belongs to the movies; the rebalance belongs to this living room. He made the yuppie mascot a person you could still love on Thursday.

Fox does not need a sidebar to explain Family Ties. NBC, 1982–1989: Alex P. Keaton as the job. s01e08 is a useful mid-run tab — No Nukes is Good Nukes is early-run politics as family argument — the Keatons litigating the decade in a living room, not a lecture hall. The handshake remains s01e01: The Pilot mints Fox as a supply-side sitcom spokesman: hippie parents, Reagan-kid son, living-room politics without a textbook. Watch the hour, not a clip farm. Fox is still the assignment.

Spin City brought him back into a New York pressure cooker: staffers colliding, scandals mutating, a star whose comic timing still looks like muscle memory. Later seasons handed keys onward; the tempo is his. On TV Flash Fox is 1980s–90s sitcom electricity — the vest and the briefing, the joke that lands like policy. Watch the first title for the argument. Watch the second for the sprint.

Mike Flaherty belongs to Spin City, the ABC run (1996–2002) that still photographs as a person instead of a logo. s02e01 is a useful mid-run tab — Paul Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: political farce with actual tempo, scandals mutating on a sitcom clock. The handshake remains s01e01: Michael J. Fox back in a New York pressure cooker, comic timing as muscle memory, staffers already colliding. Fox is already the reason the title has a pulse.