Warming Trend (original) (raw)

“Parenthood” mixes humor and pathos with a free hand, resulting in one of the finest dramas on television.Illustration by PABLO LOBATO

There’s a popular theory that the mark of a great TV show is that it dares you to reject it. The most ambitious dramas repel their audiences (“The Sopranos”) or confuse them (“The Wire”) or give them nightmares about bodies dissolving in acid (“Breaking Bad”). The most admirable comedies, such as “30 Rock,” crackle with cynicism. On certain nights, one might imagine that “Seinfeld” had stamped its motto all over the TV schedule: no hugging, no learning.

But if you hew too tightly to that bias (something I’ve done at times) you’ll miss out on an equally delightful realm of television—the talky, heartfelt, yet surprisingly nuanced style of a show like “Parenthood.” A sprawling, multigenerational ensemble series, “Parenthood” might look, to someone who had seen only flashes in passing, like a soap opera, suspiciously overstocked with sequences of family members dancing in the kitchen. Yet it’s one of only two great dramas on network television. (The other is “The Good Wife.”) Week after week, “Parenthood,” on NBC, risks corniness, tiptoes up to the edge of conventionality, then delivers real emotion. Its strength is arguably as valuable as the ability of other series to agitate their fans: it manages to be warm, even sentimental, without being dumb.

In this respect, the show is not alone. There’s a quiet crest of similar sitcoms on network television, the best among them being “Parks and Recreation.” But “Parenthood,” since it’s a one-hour drama, can go deeper with its characters, mixing humor and pathos with a free hand. The series, which is based on the 1989 movie, was created by Jason Katims, whose first TV writing job was on Winnie Holzman’s “My So-Called Life.” That show’s one perfect season was produced by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of “thirtysomething.” And, really, for as long as I have been an adult, someone in the Herskovitz-Zwick orbit seems to have had a show on the air, generally on the verge of cancellation. In 1996, there was the short-lived “Relativity.” It was followed by three seasons of the low-rated “Once and Again”; the promising “Huge,” which was cancelled midseason last year; and, of course, Katims’s gorgeous Texas football-and-family series, “Friday Night Lights,” the one such show to be fully embraced by TV snobs. After getting bumped from NBC, “Friday Night Lights” ended its run, this summer, on DirecTV. “Parenthood” is still hanging in there on the network, but its season order was cut from twenty-two episodes to eighteen.

If it gets cancelled, I may never recover. The show has become stronger with each season, and ever more adroit at handling an ensemble so big and baggy that even the Waltons might have been intimidated. “Parenthood” centers on the Braverman family, sixty-something Zeek and Camille and their four adult children: upright Adam, uptight Julia, screw-up Sarah, and hipster doofus Crosby. There’s also Adam’s wife, Kristina; Julia’s husband, Joel; Crosby’s ex, Jasmine; plus seven children, ranging in age from a newborn baby to an eighteen-year-old girl. The show is best known for the groundbreaking treatment of eleven-year-old Max (Max Burkholder), Adam and Kristina’s son, who has high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome (as does Katims’s own son). But that story is just one of many: Julia is adopting a child from her barista (long story), Crosby is starting a business, Amber—Sarah’s teen-age daughter—is living in a rat-infested loft. Some plots misfire, and a few veer close to wishful thinking, but little of this matters, because the structure feels so confident. The show takes its time, letting small moments unfurl, like Sarah’s reaction when her younger boyfriend tells her that he can imagine them having a baby. The two are curled up on a sofa when he blurts this out. As he begins to backtrack, she jolts upright, stares back in shock, then in mock shock, shifting in subtle increments until she smiles, lets her face go blank again, and leans back into his arms with relaxed panic, a twenty-sided facial expression that should earn Lauren Graham a special Emmy.

As this scene suggests, “Parenthood” is at its best when finding odd, fresh sources of emotion in hackneyed stories. In a recent episode, Max ran away from home—a standard network sucker punch. (“The Good Wife” used the same gambit, very effectively, a week later.) Kristina, who had recently given birth, had returned to work. Adam also needed to work on the weekend, which meant that the couple cancelled a museum trip with Max. Haddie, their teen-age daughter, was pressured into babysitting, and everyone was resentful, particularly Max, who struggles with any changes to his routine.

When Max left to take the bus to the museum by himself, many shows would have dug in for maximum drama: father blaming daughter, father screaming at mother for not answering her cell phone, Max melting down. Instead, the Bravermans acted as they always do. They argued, but they kept the lid on the pot. The grownups remained grownups. There was a frightening scene in which Max—who has trouble gauging social environments—asked for directions from a homeless man, but mostly he just rode the bus in circles.

And yet sadness leaked through. In the episode’s climactic sequence, the police brought Max home. As his relieved parents steered him into the house, Haddie blew up at her brother, who was chattering about his lizard. “Do you care? No, you don’t,” she began, and then, as she tried to state her case, she broke down, her voice cracking, until she got to “It’s so hard. It’s not fair. We try so hard to make things normal, and it’s just not.” The family froze, and yet the rupture felt real. When her father went to talk to her afterward, the two mended things simply, in the manner of those who are close enough for emotional shorthand. “I guess it’s not fine, but it is the way that it is, right? So . . .” Haddie said, trailing off. “I know it’s not his fault, but it just sucks a little.”

The revelation of “Parenthood”—and of shows like it—is how little they are about individual characters, and how much they are about larger systems. The show has been particularly smart in dramatizing Max’s effect on everyone around him: the way his condition has at once divided and united his parents, built tricky bridges with his cousins, forced his sister into a good-girl role, and made his mother, Kristina—who shoulders the task of overseeing Max’s therapies—anxious and vigilant. On other shows, Kristina’s high-strung personality might be satirized, portrayed as shrill. On “Parenthood,” she’s seen with loving eyes. But, then, so are all the characters: the default setting of the show is generosity; it grades every character on a curve.

Still, when “Parenthood” stirs the sap, it is wise enough to suggest that some tensions may never be resolved. When the Bravermans finally went to the museum, the cameras let us observe the family from a distance—Max’s arms flying up in excitement as he went running toward a dinosaur. The scene was filmed loosely, lushly, a happy memory in the making. But there was one small closeup: Kristina touched her son’s arm, Max reflexively shrugged her off. And then, fluidly, Kristina recovered and turned, smiling, toward her husband, who was holding their new baby; and Haddie spoke excitedly to her brother, pointing at the exhibit; and the cameras slipped above their heads and behind them, so we could see the parents embrace, the family united. I knew that perhaps I should feel manipulated. Instead, I cried.

“Husbands” was created by Jane Espenson, best known for her writing on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It’s an eleven-part series so far, distributed free on the Web. And yet this mini-est of series (thirty-five minutes total) is what its own characters might describe as “totes adorbs.” After a night of partying in Las Vegas, a gay couple wake up married. Since both of them are famous (one is a tabloid personality, the other a celebrity athlete), they agree to make a go of it—if only for the cause of marriage equality. Brady, the sports star (played by Sean Hemeon), worries that if they don’t they’ll “be Britney.”

“On the upside,” purrs his husband, Cheeks (played by . . . Cheeks), sprawling on the bed and shooting him a puckish glance, “we’d be Britney.”

This is classic opposites-attract stuff, with a gay spin. Brady is a butch worrywart; Cheeks is a tart diva (or maybe a diva tart). On a nothing budget, Espenson and her teensy cast score laughs, and also give us streaks of romance. Cheeks is the standout, a confident flibbertigibbet who regards himself as a modern Blanche DuBois, preening for the best Webcam angle. He’s got his own credo to uphold. “I stand for something, too, you know,” he complains. “I’m all about me! I mean, about individuality, not trying to make America comfortable with me.”

Web-only TV is a new phenomenon. I always want to recommend these series, the way that Cheeks and Brady want to support gay marriage. (“So important. So . . . abstract.”) The sad truth is that, so far, most Web series are worth watching only in theory. “Husbands” is one notch better, and not only for the way it puts two gay men center stage. But, if camp is not your thing, here’s another worthy experiment to toss five dollars at: Louis C.K.’s terrific new hour of comedy, streamed straight from his Web site. Both projects suggest a future in which audiences might cut out the middleman, supporting artists online, free of network demands. Given current TV economics, that utopia can’t arrive too soon. ♦