Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1986’s Under the Influence!  It  can be viewed on YouTube!

Noah Talbot (Andy Griffith) is an upstanding member of the community.  He owns a hardware store.  He has a large family.  He’s known as a gruff but folky storyteller.  He’s a deacon in his church and helps to collect the offering every Sunday.

He’s also a drunk and a bit of a bully.  His family walks on eggshells around him, fearful of setting him off on one of his benders.  He occasionally spends the night in jail, arrested for trying to drive drunk.  Even when he gets bailed out, his first instinct is to go back to the bar.  The folks at the bar love him, don’t you know.  The people at the bar are always happy to see him and never bother him about whether he’s had too much.  The people at the bar never let him down the way that he feels his family has left him down.

The members of his family each cope in their own individual way.  Noah’s wife (Joyce Van Patten) is in denial and spends a lot of her time popping pills.  His oldest daughter, Ann (Season Hubley), is driven to succeed at work and spends all of her time both hating her father and desperately hoping for his approval.  (When she tells him that she got a raise at work, he berates her for only getting a 6% increase in her salary.  “That’s just a cost of living increase!” he snaps at her.)  His eldest son, Stephen (Paul Provenza), fled to Los Angeles and is trying to make a career as stand-up comedian.  (“You’re no David Letterman,” Noah tells him.)  His youngest daughter, Terri (Dana Anderson), secretly replaces Noah’s liquor with water and food-coloring.  And his youngest son, Eddie (Keanu Reeves), is becoming an alcoholic himself.

Having read all that, you may be wondering just how exactly Keanu Reeves could be the son of Andy Griffith and it’s a fair question.  This was one Keanu Reeves’s first acting roles and he does a pretty good job in the role of Eddie.  That said, he looks so totally different from both Andy Griffith and Joyce Van Patten and the actors playing his siblings that I was half-expecting someone to mention that Eddie had been adopted.  Then again, Paul Provenza doesn’t really bear much of a resemblance to the actors playing his parents either.  Dana Anderson and Season Hubley do, at least, look like sisters.

Lack of family-resemblance aside, all of the actors in Under the Influence do a good job of inhabiting their characters.  For those who are used to seeing Andy Griffith playing friendly Southerners in reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock, it’s shocking and a little disturbing to see him playing an abusive, alcoholic jerk in Under the Influence.  Noah is someone who would not only destroy his own family to get a drink but who would then blame them for it happening in the first place.  Noah may be under the influence of alcohol but the entire family is suffering because they’re under the influence of Noah.  By the time Noah is spitting up blood and demanding that his youngest son sneak liquor into his hospital room, the viewer knows there is no hope for Noah but hopefully, his family will escape.

It doesn’t make for a particularly happy movie but, speaking as someone who grew up in an alcoholic household, I can attest that it does make for an honest portrayal of what addiction does not just to the addict but also to the people around the addict.  I cringed in sympathy through nearly the entire film, especially as I watched three of the four children react in the same ways that I did.  (Unlike Eddie, I never became much of a drinker and instead developed an aversion to alcohol in general.)  It’s a film that feels real and one’s heart aches for the entire family.  If it could happen to Andy Griffith, it could happen to anyone.