There’s something magnetic about Parenthood. The family drama now in its fourth season is something like an hour-long counterpart to Modern Family. Following three generations of the Braverman family in four households (plus the grandparents), parenthood is explored as a rich and fertile theme, a well-source for narrative and emotional storytelling that never runs dry.
The series is not a teen drama. Parenting teens enters the scene alongside issues that affect younger children (like how to talk to your biracial, 8-year-old son about the N-word, or how to react when your 6-year old declares herself a vegetarian), as well as the relationships between parents and their adult children (like watching your daughter begin a career, or go off to college). The focus is also inevitably on the parents, so when the story is one about a high school senior whose girlfriend breaks up with him on the first day of school, the emphasis remains with his mother, and her misguided attempts to help, interfere, and talk about his romantic life (when he would really like to be left alone).
Beyond this, I have not singled out this show to discuss how it represents those teenaged characters, in particular. How teens are represented seems to fit with the overall attempts to depict family life honestly. What strikes me about Parenthood and its success is its incredibly compelling sincerity. It’s a quality that many teen dramas tend to lack. Not necessarily in their attempts to sincerely depict the emotional high school experience, but in their techniques for creating narrative and manipulating conflict.
Here’s the thing.
Parenthood‘s premise is not unique. For the most part, the characters and story lines are fairly uneventful, ordinary. The series seems to go to great lengths to find the every day stories that make up larger dramas (like adoption, autism, and mixed race family life). Yet the tone that permeates the dialogue is one of openness, honesty, and trust, and somehow this makes it so incredibly different from anything else. This series embraces representing this side of loving relationships that is so significant to everyone’s lives, and yet remains stifled across television.
So often, narrative conflict and drama are created by a frustrating lack of honesty, a poorly timed lie, suspicion, or deceit. Characters thus seem to be manipulated by the writer’s pen, rather than by the internal logic of the fictional world they populate. It is these moments that find me railing at my television “JUST TELL HIM THE TRUTH!”
Eschewing this prevalent (and often lazy) tactic, Parenthood fills its episodes with the real (occasionally mundane) small dramas of family life. It is refreshingly honest and open and its characters speak freely to one another. They address problems they have respectfully, trying not to pick a fight. They confide in each other. They admit to their mistakes instead of letting the damage pile up. They express what they need and want from their spouses. They talk frankly and honestly, and in their world this is the norm.
It is an amazingly cathartic experience to watch mature individuals who have nothing but love between them go about their lives without playing games, or holding back information, or lying out of shame. It is cathartic and refreshing because it is so bewilderingly absent from so much television drama today. Filling this emotional desire for honesty and forthrightness, this show does an amazing job of making the lives of parents compelling. It is with this realization that I came to accept and understand my appreciation for (and inability to stop myself from crying at) all the moving moments, minor tragedies, and minimal victories of Parenthood.
