A MarkInTexas Made-For-TV Christmas: John Grin's Christmas (1986)

One of the reasons, I think, that A Christmas Carol had endured over the years is because its plot is quite versatile.  Yes, most adaptions take place in Victorian England and focus on a miser named Ebeneezer Scrooge, but the basic concept--that someone who is not living their life the way it should be lived can get a course correction from three spirits--is readily adaptable to numerous situations.  Just off the top of my head, I can think of variations that led to network executives, old west ranch owners, musical divas, Depression-era businessmen, junkyard owners, college students, and modern stone age cavemen being visited by the spirits on Christmas Eve.

A few months after his long-running sitcom Benson ended, Robert Guillaume returned to ABC with his own variation on A Christmas Carol, John Grin's Christmas.  Guillaume believed in the project so much that he not only starred as Grin, he also produced and directed it (his only directing credit).  Despite his name and his job as the owner of a toy company, Grin is not a happy person, indeed he's quite grim.  As the Scrooge stand-in, he's also quite greedy, a something the special leaves no doubt about in its opening scene, in which he tells a representative from the local children's hospital who has come to collect the company's annual donation that had been started by Grin's recently deceased partner that he can't just donate the toys, but he'd be happy to sell them to her.  He then goes on to refuse to help a teen boy (a young Alfonso Ribeiro) who is looking for a job, forces his accountant (Kevin Guillaume--his real life son) to work late on Christmas Eve, and even tells off a charity bell ringer.  Of course he's going to get visited by spirits.

This one does shake up the formula a little bit by dispensing with a Marley equivalent (even though Grin's business partner recently died, someone calls him a "saint") and starts with the Ghost of Christmas Past (Roscoe Lee Brown).  As it turns out, Grin's backstory is even more tragic than Scrooge's, though he is largely unmoved by seeing his past.  He's also largely unmoved by the Ghost of Christmas Present (Ted Lange) showing him his accountant's Christmas Day and how the teen really is a hard worker who just wants to do right by his mom.  In another break with tradition, the Ghost of Christmas Future (Geoffrey Holder) does not wear a cloak hiding his face, but instead reveals it in full from the start as he takes Grin to a stylized play showing Grin's own death, which is what finally seems to get through to him.

Guillaume, who spent years playing the good-hearted, if sarcastic, Benson, seems to be having a ball playing someone 180 degrees removed from his sitcom character.  And while I doubt this was the first all-African-American variation on this tale, it still serves as a counterpoint to traditional tellings of the story, whose casts tend to be whiter than Frosty.  But the show itself is rather clunky.  A consistent rhythm is never really established and the whole thing feels disjointed.  Plus, unlike with Cratchit with Scrooge, we're left to wonder why the accountant just doesn't find a new job if he feels like working for Grin is so oppressive.

I watched John Grin's Christmas about ten days ago on YouTube, but when I went back to review the special, it seems to have disappeared off of there.  I'm not a fan of the special, but I hope it gets reposted because I hate for media to disappear like that.  So, for the time being, you won't be able to watch this special for yourself.  That is a shame, but then again, even if it was on there, there are numerous superior versions of A Christmas Carol to watch instead.

Next time:  The modern stone age Christmas