How Parenthood drove me crazy

August 21, 2024

The six Braverman families at the heart of “Parenthood,” Jason Katims’s family drama, which is now in its sixth and final season, initially looked like a kind of liberal ideal. In adorable craftsmen houses and in small apartments, the Bravermans raised interracial families and a boy with Asperger syndrome. The clan included stay-at-home dads, single moms and corporate-drones-turned-recording-studio heads. “Parenthood” may have been a sly endorsement of conservative visions of self-reliance and strong families, but it was also overwhelmingly, unrelentingly a reflection of its Berkeley, California setting.

And as “Parenthood,” a show I have loved, draws to a close, that ethos is driving me slowly nuts. “Parenthood” has become everything that conservatives love to parody about liberal culture: myopic and obsessed with self-actualization to the point of doing real damage to others.

Most of my problems center around Adam (Peter Krause) and Kristina (Monica Potter). For the first few seasons, they seemed like the most stable leg of the zany Braverman table. They raised their son (Max Burkholder) with patience and good cheer after he received a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome, and if meant that their daughter Haddie (Sarah Ramos) occasionally got short shrift, the atmosphere in their house was such that she grew up in a dignified, smart young woman none the less.

But my affection for Adam and Kristina began to curdle last season.

After recovering from breast cancer, Kristina decided to run for mayor of Berkeley against her old consulting client, Bob Little (Jonathan Tucker). “Parenthood” might have tried to build a compelling case for her candidacy based on her past work experience, but instead, the show and her campaign treated her new zeal for life and her experience parenting Max as if they were credentials enough to run a city of more than 100,000 people. And both Kristina and “Parenthood” seemed to decide that Bob was some sort of bad person because he had previously dated Kristina’s niece Amber (Mae Whitman), who might have been younger than him, but was certainly of age. “Parenthood” treated the mayorality not like a serious job, but like an appropriate reward for Kristina’s fortitude.

This year, Adam and Kristina went ahead and opened a charter school, once again with parenting Max as their main qualification. And as Max develops a crush on his fellow student Dylan (Ally Ioannides), “Parenthood” has shown Adam and Kristina make a series of terrible mistakes that makes it impossible to trust them as school administrators and much harder to watch them without cringing in utter agony at their lack of self-awareness.

Max, perhaps not surprisingly given his diagnosis, turns to pick-up artist techniques to figure out how to approach Dylan. I understand why Adam and Kristina want to encourage him to develop social skills and to follow up on his feelings. But as both parents and school executives, they end up demonstrating an appalling lack of respect for the rights of other students, and in this week’s episode, they essentially got away with doing so.

When Max distributed flyers all over school, smearing another boy who Dylan had become involved with, Kristina gave him a talking-to, completely ignoring that she had two other students who had just been shamed by her son. In another bid for attention, Max declared his affection for Dylan in the lunch room, a gesture that had the effect of making Dylan feel an enormous amount of pressure. Kristina’s reaction was to congratulate him for his bravery in expressing his feelings, leaving Dylan alone in the cafeteria.

And this week, Kristina brushed off Dylan’s frantic requests to partner with someone other than Max for a school project. Max took the opportunity to pressure Dylan about dating him yet again.” “Is it because I haven’t demonstrated my physical affection and am now in the friend zone?” he demanded to know, trying to touch Dylan as she pushed him off, panicked, just as a group of visiting parents showed up.

Dylan’s parents are right to be furious about Max’s behavior and Adam and Kristina’s obliviousness and insistence that the whole thing is just a misunderstanding or a “complication.”

“Which complication are you referring to?” Dylan’s father demands to know. “Are you referring to when he distributed a bunch of malicious flyers all over the school about another student? Or the violence he threatened the boy with? Or maybe it was one of the tons of unwanted gifts he’s been publicly bestowing on our daughter?” Watching Adam lash out at them, characterizing their reaction as “a couple of absentee parents trying to blame somebody else for their own oblivion because you haven’t been home. You haven’t been watching your daughter”, made me feel physically ill.

But “Parenthood” is so solidly Team Braverman that it cannot assign Adam, Kristina and Max any really serious consequences. Dylan, despite her awful experience, begs Kristina to make the case to her parents that she should not have to switch schools. Her parents end up apologizing to Adam and Kristina and accepting Adam’s diagnosis of their parenting. Max is obviously upset by the prospect that he has been harassing Dylan: “Harassment is defined as aggressive or intimidating pressure. I was only trying to do nice things,” he explains to his parents. But even though Adam and Kristina bring over Max to apologize to Dylan, they also reassure him that he was not harassing her.

I understand the impulse to treat a character like Max with kindness–he is a child, and he was following a set of instructions, partially provided by his parents, that are dangerous precisely because they obscure nuance and consent.

But “Parenthood” could have made a sharper point that Max’s actions, no matter his intentions, did constitute harassment and make Dylan physically uncomfortable, and there ought to be consequences beyond a conversation. At a moment when pick-up culture and the language of sexual entitlement is having serious real-world implications, watching the Bravermans prioritize their son’s comfort over Dylan’s safety reveals the limits of their goodness. If I was sure “Parenthood” meant that to be the takeaway, I might be impressed. But that would run counter to everything Katims has taught us about the Bravermans over the previous five seasons.

And it’s genuinely disturbing to see Adam and Kristina get to go on as before despite the fact that they have effectively used a bunch of other students as objects in their ongoing project to help Max acclimate to the world. They never seemed qualifed to run a school, and now that they have demonstrated it, “Parenthood” might have considered letting them really fail, instead of just have yet another obstacle over which they emerge triumphant and flush with self-esteem.

Adam and Kristina may be the Bravermans who most make me wish to set my own hair on fire, but “Parenthood” is not doing other members of their extended family any favors, either.

Crosby Braverman (Dax Shepherd) is only now emerging from his extended adolescence. But the cause of his revelation is not exactly admirable. He recognizes that his hope that big bands will just spontaneously to record at his studio, the Luncheonette, is just a fantasy only when his wife Jasmine (Joy Bryant) has to take a square’s gig as a file clerk to make ends meet, rather than pursuing an artistic dream job. In Braverman-land, it’s a failure to self-actualize that is the biggest tragedy.

And Crosby and Adam’s niece Amber is also in a quandary that “Parenthood” has handled in a weirdly cavalier way. Their failure to build their business means that Amber is facing the loss of her job as she prepares to become a single mother to her baby with her ex-fiancé.

“Parenthood” had a very effective episode that highlighted just how unprepared Amber was for motherhood. Left to babysit Max and his younger sister Nora (played alternately by Mia and Ellen Allen), everything melts down. Amber realizes she does not even have a car seat, much less room in her tiny studio, for a child. That might have been the beginning of a productive multi-episode plot where Amber reckons with her decision to continue the pregnancy and with the other choices that have left her economically precarious. But “Parenthood” cannot afford to pay all their actors to be in all their episodes, and it has a lot to wrap up over its final shortened season. Some Braxton Hicks contractions aside, “Parenthood” does not seem to have a lot of time for Amber’s troubles.

The thing that would make the Bravermans annoying in real life–their blitheness and extreme comfort–also leeches the stakes out of a lot of their stories. Time and the vicissitudes of the heart still make for effective enemies, and it is no mistake that patriarch Zeek Braverman’s (Craig T. Nelson) struggles to accept his failing health, and Joel and Julia Braverman-Graham’s (Sam Jaeger and Erika Christensen) struggles to decide whether to end their marriage or repair it have been the high points of this season. But nothing else can touch the Bravermans. They will always be fine, no matter how they treat anyone else. That makes it hard to worry about them–and hard to root for them, too.

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