Season’s greetings from Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech report. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or you’re reading it on FastCompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. Your feedback and ideas are most welcome. Send them to me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com.
I will be taking next week off, which means that this is the final Plugged In of the year. Thank you so much for your support throughout 2023—it’s been fun having you along for the ride. Happy holidays to all, and see you in 2024.
If you were watching TV on the evening of Tuesday, December 18, 1962, you had the chance to tune into a one-hour piece of entertainment history on NBC. The show in question, Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, featured the cantankerous, nearsighted character playing Ebenezer Scrooge. Directed by the great animator Abe Levitow, it was the first animated Christmas special—and it was a hit.
Over the next dozen years, a parade of other such specials arrived, some of which became beloved holiday traditions. They included Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass’s stop-motion puppet show Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Charles Schulz, Bill Melendez, and Lee Mendelson’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), Chuck Jones and Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), and three more Rankin-Bass productions: Frosty the Snowman (1969), Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), and The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974). As a kid, I eagerly awaited all of them—except for The Year Without a Santa Claus, which I somehow never saw. (Nonetheless, I can hum the “Mr. Heat Miser” song.)
Today, of course, most TV watching doesn’t require eagerly awaiting anything. Almost everything is out there and streamable at the time of your choosing. Which doesn’t mean you will stream it: Knowing something is always available has a funny way of leading to you (or at least me) never getting around to making time for it.
So this year I made a point of revisiting my favorite Christmas specials—both to enjoy them all over again and as an exercise in better understanding what it’s like to experience them in the streaming era. And I quickly learned two things that surprised me.
First, these shows have scattered to the winds. No single service has them all—especially if you don’t want to pay for à la carte rentals or purchases—and tracking everything down involves a level of research that wasn’t necessary back when TV Guide was the definitive source of information on program schedules. Even with handy what’s-on-where services such as JustWatch, it feels like homework.
Second, it turns out that streaming hasn’t transformed this ritual as much as I assumed. Many Christmas specials still get aired on broadcast TV, just as they did in my youth. It warmed my heart to think that they’re still viable appointment TV, and that some kids experienced them that way for the first time this year.
If you want to contend that A Charlie Brown Christmas is the greatest holiday special of all, I won’t argue the point. (The New York Times’ James Poniewozik recently made the case in a wonderful essay.) It’s also the scarcest commodity these days. Apple TV+ has an exclusive on it (and all Peanuts-based animation), a fact that raised enough hackles back in 2020 that Apple struck a deal to let PBS air the program. This year, it’s Apple TV+ or nothing. But Apple did cut nonsubscribers like me a break by streaming the special for free last weekend, a gift I gratefully accepted.
Watching the other iconic specials is a test of how well you know which sources of entertainment you’ve got. Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol rents for as little as $2.98, but it’s included with Peacock Premium, which—who knew?—is bundled into my Xfinity cable modem plan. And last Saturday, I paid $20 for an Amazon Prime Video four-pack of Rankin-Bass shows—right before I realized I could watch Rudolph and Frosty for free on CBS that very night. But that was only because I could tune into the network via an HD antenna: The programs were blacked out on CBS’s streaming incarnations due to rights issues, like some big-time sporting event.
(Gratuitous side note: The version of Frosty I purchased from Amazon says it’s suitable only for viewers ages 13 and older. Let the record show that watching the talking snowman’s escapades as a small child did not tempt me to start smoking a corncob pipe.)
The Rankin-Bass specials tend to get dinged for lacking genuine Christmas spirit. (In recent years, The Atlantic has published two different articles tearing into Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.) Grown-up me acknowledges they might be a tad shallow. Still, I’m always happy to revisit them—especially the polished puppetry of Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, which continues to bump around in the back of my brain regardless of whether I’ve seen the program recently or not.
But one of my takeaways from my Christmas special binge is that even if you think you know a show by heart, you don’t. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I DVR’d from one of its numerous broadcasts on TNT and TBS—it will also air on NBC on Christmas night—is a case in point. It was full of stuff that felt new to me all over again, from verses of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” I’d forgotten to tiny evocative details in the Whoville scenery (which, incidentally, was designed by a good friend of mine, Maurice Noble).
As a kid, having the power to watch The Grinch and the rest of these cherished works of Americana at a time of my choosing would have boggled my little mind. In a way, it still does—and I don’t intend to wait until Christmas 2024 to take advantage of it again.
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