As someone who covers food professionally, Thanksgiving is both a wonderland and a minefield. Every year, the stories could practically write themselves: The best turkey brine you'll ever try. This pie will impress even your persnickety aunt. How to carve like a pro. The holiday machine churns with relentless aspiration, suggesting that with just the right tools or tips, your dinner can transcend the chaos and become a picture-perfect feast. And yet, there have certainly been years when I’ve found myself in front of my own table — a hodgepodge of mismatched plates, gravy splatters and the faint whiff of latent family tension — thinking, “Martha Stewart lied to us all.”
This disconnect between Thanksgiving as imagined in glossy spreads and the Thanksgiving most of us experience is perhaps why I find myself so utterly charmed by “Bob’s Burgers’” semi-annual Thanksgiving specials. For 15 seasons, the Belcher family has regularly turned what could easily become a tired sitcom trope into a reliable highlight of the beloved series.
Despite being a family whose lives often center around food by virtue of running a restaurant, they tackle the holiday not with........