The 20 best Christmas episodes of all time, from The Office to Friends
Family dramas, tired old jokes, attempts at sentimentality. Yep, we all know when Christmas has arrived at home, but what’s it like on the telly? Well... there are lashings of that stuff too when it comes to the festive TV episode – one of the most difficult challenges going for writers and producers, despite the prospect of a large, almost literally captive audience. Yet some Christmas specials deliver with all the panache of Santa making a grand entrance down the chimney and kicking the coals into the centre of the living room.
So here we go with a rundown of our favourites. Laughs, we’ve got those. Tears, yes, those too. We’ve taken a few liberties: the episode of The Wire featured below went out on 10 December in America, for example, and who knows when we saw it on that ghost of Christmas past, the boxset. But it has carols and that’s good enough for us...
20. Doctor Who, ‘A Christmas Carol’ (2010)
It’s surprising, given what a big, playful fantasy series has been all these years, that it has produced so few decent Christmas specials. It’s as if the lurking prohibition – don’t terrify sleep-starved children on Christmas night – and the invitation to “go large” ensure that the specials can be particularly daft, kitschy and over the top. “A Christmas Carol” shares all these flaws – flying sharks, fezzes and a singing Katherine Jenkins make an appearance – but somehow makes a virtue of them, thanks to the energy of Matt Smith as the Doctor, the nastiness of Michael Gambon as bitter old Kazran Sardick, and the panache of Steven Moffat (with a little plot help from Charles Dickens). It’s not in the first rank of Who stories
