My husband and I like to make fun of the TV adaptation of "Parenthood"--the difficult conversations, the swelling melodies, the weird mustache that someone selected for Jason Ritter. (If, anywhere on Earth, there is a "good" mustache, it's not the one that Jason Ritter is wearing.)
Still, I think "Parenthood" is a fine showcase for (the writer) Jason Katims's special talent, and mainly I think this because the scripts center on a functional marriage. Katims made his name by looking at a sturdy pairing--the bond between Coach Taylor and Tami Taylor, in "Friday Night Lights"--and the "Taylor" scenes were so electrifying, they inspired at least one lengthy essay in the NY Review of Books. In "Parenthood," Katims basically takes the Taylors and gives them new names--Adam and Kristina Braverman.
Often, TV dramas have a hard time with marriage. Benson, on SVU, is perpetually single; Dick Wolf seems to think that a romantic bond would mean an "end" to Benson's story. "Mad Men," "The Sopranos," and "Breaking Bad" all made commitments to hatred and infidelity; no one would look to these shows to find hopeful ideas about the institution of holy matrimony. So "Parenthood" is an outlier.
The Bravermans like each other--and, still, they are tested. They can't afford college bills for their daughter, they have differing ideas about cancer treatment, they can't quite sync up in their assessments of one problematic in-law, they have "timeline" issues in their discussions about pet adoption. They don't agree about dieting. One thinks it's OK to drive a car if you are seriously ill; the other would rather follow Doctor's Orders.
The "Katims playbook" gets old, at times: Secrets and lies are revealed, healing conversations occur, new bits of tension are churned up. Often, I wish for something truly random and catastrophic: A speeding car could decapitate a central player, or Adam Braverman could forget his abiding "goodness" and throw an innocent colleague under a bus. But every writer has strengths and weaknesses. If Katims were to become Matthew Weiner, then he'd no longer be Katims.
"Parenthood" deserves a solid B-plus, I think; I'm still watching.
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