November 28, 1994
Page 88
TELEVISION
JOHN LEONARD
....Also returning -- from hiatus, for a two-hour Thanksgiving special, and maybe onto the network schedule early next year -- is "Christy" (Thursday, November 24; 8 to 10 P.M.; CBS). To refresh your memory of the series deriving from Catherine Marshall's novel: Kellie Martin stars as an idealistic 19-year-old who leaves genteel Ashville, North Carolina, in 1912 to teach in an Appalachian mission- ary school. There to assist her in her own education into a moon- shine culture of possums, bagpipes, and ghosts are Stewart Finlay- McLennan as a handsome doctor, Randall Batinkoff as a handsome young minister, Tess Harper as a poor but proud mountain woman, and Tyne Daly as a gun-toting Quaker ("Were you meant to come here and serve, or were you only running away from home?") There are also, of course, the children, all twelve grades of them, sleepy because they get up at dawn, barefoot because they can't afford shoes: the girl-child who won't talk, the boy-child who lies all the time, the secret reader of "David Copperfield".
What happens Thursday is a surprise appearence in Cutter Gap of Christy's father (Robert Foxworth) in the middle of rehearsals for a Plymouth Rock pageant, when there is no money to buy seed to plant corn, and no way to get a thousand- pound bell from the railway station through to the church, and the children are off on a turkey shoot with a half-breed Cherokee (Richard Tyson) about whom they have racist feelings. Dad promptly has a stroke. Mom (Dixie Carter) arrives from Asheville with an attitude. Christy looks as if she'll have to return home with her work hardly begun. But Tess, who's psychic, has a vision. And Tyne, who's omnicompetent, has a plan. And by the time the bell tolls for Thanksgiving dinner, we will have learned something about pilgrims and the Trail of Tears...mothers and emotional blackmail ...country doctors and manna from Heaven -- after which (another surprise!) Judy Collins sings.
If this sounds too wholesome, you deserve to go hungry your- self. For all her quick temper, quicker dispair, terrible doubts, romantic entanglements, condescensions, and misapprehensions, Christy embodies a noble idea: Because the nation can't afford to waste a single child, our privileged young invest themselves, and everybody learns how little we really know about one another. In this mean season of death penalties, immigrant-bashing, and the inflamed eye of the rampant Newt, it's important to be reminded that out of moonshine, bagpipes, church bells, history lessons, cartwheels, and an ax, we make the music of a better republic...