Cutting the ‘Family Ties’

When NBC’s “Family Ties” were severed last weekend after seven successful years of TV bonding, an end-of-the-series party gave cast members the perfect opportunity to let their hair down.

Or dye it.

Or even cut it off.

Courteney Cox, Bruce Springsteen’s partner in his video “Dancing in the Dark” and Alex Keaton’s honey-with-the-dark-brown-hair, arrived at the Gene Autry Western Museum Sunday night with her locks colored deep red. Justine Bateman, who plays Mallory Keaton, bobbed hers; Michael Gross, head of the household as Steven Keaton, again shaved his familiar beard; and the youngest cast member, 6-year-old Brian Bonsall (who plays Andrew), wore a spiked punk-rock hairdo and earrings.

The night before, “Family Ties,” the Emmy Award-winning sitcom that helped revive family-oriented programming, had completed an emotional taping of a special one-hour finale (which will air at 8 p.m. on May 14), giving the cast just enough time to stop off at a hair salon before the party.

“We taped the last episode in front of an audience of family and friends,” said 27-year-old Michael J. Fox, who joined the show in 1982 as an unknown Canadian-born actor and parlayed his role as the conservative, wise-cracking Alex Keaton into a flourishing film career. “I was fine until the curtain call, then I started weeping. I felt like an idiot, until I looked around and realized I had company.”

“This week has been so much more grueling than anyone expected,” said Meredith Baxter Birney, who plays Alex’s mother, Elyse Keaton. “Everyone involved thought the show would just sort of take care of itself. No one was prepared for what we went through. It was awful.”

Approaching the taping, the script had not yet received final approval. In “Alex Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” Alex realizes his lifelong dream and is offered a $75,000-a-year executive position with a Wall Street investment banking firm, but Elyse cannot come to grips with him leaving.

“Everybody wanted to get it right, and there were rewrites up until the last minute,” Gross said. “Maybe some perverse part of our writers never wanted the show to end.”

“Last night was extraordinarily emotional,” agreed 44-year-old Gary David Goldberg, whose UBU Productions produces “Family Ties” in association with Paramount Network Television. “It was a very surreal feeling. We started a half-hour late because everyone was crying and we had to redo their makeup.

“The sadness is overwhelming. It’s like raising a great kid who you love to have around, and then he has to leave you and go to college.”

Goldberg created the concept for the show--about two hip parents who grew up in the idealism of the 1960s and are raising children whose political conservatism and materialistic concerns are firmly rooted in the 1980s--as a semi-autobiography of his own turbulent, rebellious life. When the show debuted on Sept. 22, 1982, family-oriented television was virtually a wasteland, occupied by the lone outpost, “Little House on the Prairie.”

“We stumbled into an area no one else was dealing with,” said Goldberg, who is now directing “Dad,” a feature film he wrote, starring Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson. “We were the only nuclear family on television, and we accidentally discovered a gold mine.”

Although the show initially focused on the plight of the parents, Goldberg made the children the heart and soul of “Family Ties” once he and network executives saw the immense popularity of his young cast, particularly Fox, who went on to achieve superstardom in “Back to the Future.”

“I’m nothing like Alex, which surprises a lot of people,” said three-time Emmy winner Fox, who last year married Tracy Pollan (he met her as Ellen Reed, Alex’s first “serious” girlfriend on “Family Ties”). “Alex and I share the same body and the same face, but that’s about it. Because of my character, some Republicans loved me, some Democrats loved to hate me. Some people never got it at all--I’m a card-carrying member of the Canadian liberal party.”

“The hardest thing is realizing ‘Family Ties’ is over,” 23-year-old Bateman said. “I’ll never be in that kitchen again. I’ll never be with the whole cast again. And we are a family. Being around them is like falling into a down comforter and having it fluffed every day.”

“What the show meant to America--if I can presume to speak for the country--is that it came along at a time when America needed a strong family,” Gross said. “Our success was directly proportional to how poorly the American family was actually doing, at a time when the country was beset by economic and social hardship, child abuse, divorce, drugs, you name it. I think the Reagan Era helped the show a lot.”

Goldberg firmly stated there will be no Keaton family reunions at Christmastime. And don’t expect to see nice, neat resolutions to the ongoing story lines in “Family Ties” when the final episode airs. Whether Mallory ends up with Nick or Alex stays with Lauren are left for viewer speculation. The series will end as it began, with life going on as usual in the Keaton household.

“We completed what we set out to do--put family life front and center,” Goldberg said. “We’re in top form now. We’re enraptured by the show, and we love the Keatons. But you can only sustain that energy for so long. We don’t want to become a pale reflection of what we were. Our cast is young and talented with a lifetime ahead of them. It’s time to turn them loose.”