Jeff Bogle argues that TV shows like NBC’s “Parenthood” are making huge strides in changing the ways in which dads are portrayed on television
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The Every Man. In life, in the wild, he is set of interlocking gears. A swirl of emotion, vitality, and desires that must coexist, traditionally, with being the metronome of the family. Steady as he goes. On TV, however, the Every Man is of a singular purpose, a character painted with a lone primary color by a brush so damn wide as to cover the side of a barn with a bare minimum of strokes. We’re either the aggressive sports fanatic, the hapless doofus, the can’t-commit dude, the whipped house boy, or the fix-anything-but-his-relationship guy. It’s tiring, but thankfully, the portrayal of dads on the small screen is starting to change.
Parenthood stands in firm objection to the trope of the one-dimensional man. The compelling hour long NBC drama from creator/executive producer Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights) has been on the air now for five seasons, a feat in and of itself in today’s fickle media market, but its tenure is even more impressive when you consider the risks Katims and his team have taken from day one in writing their male characters in a such a way as to provide them with room to breathe and choke on the heavy air, to be awkward yet unafraid of how that might look to others, and unknowing but searching for the best way forward. There is so much humanity on display, so much of ourselves in there, that it hurts.
There’s something to be said for first impressions, and the opening 10 minutes of Parenthood’s pilot episode deliver a more vulnerable, confused, hurried, tender portrait of a father than maybe any show ever has. With The Avett Brothers “Kickdrum Heart” pounding in the background, we see Adam, Peter Krause’s character, push off of his porch for a morning run. Confident, full of life. Until he’s panting, a sweaty mess who hasn’t yet traveled far enough to warrant the exhaustion. And then we watch him juggle his life with imperfections and missteps and minor ice cream-incentivized glories. Real stuff, all of it. Beautiful stuff, every frame. If you’re not crying by the end, you might just be dead. Check your pulse and get some help.
While listening to Katims speak about fatherhood and Parenthood with Bobblehead Dad Jim Higley at the annual Dad 2.0 Summit, an event designed in part around improving the fatherly image in the media, a couple of weekends ago in New Orleans, I experienced a tidal wave of emotion at the beauty of the words, the filming, the spacing of the breathes, the beats allotted to the service of silence, and the camera’s willingness and ability to pause on a moment to let the physicality of the actors quietly advance the storylines. I committed myself right then and there to taking a deep breath and plunging into this show that somehow passed me by over the past half-decade.
I’ll warn you now—it is not easy to binge watch Parenthood. It is heavy, it is long, and it is a show you want to be present for at every step of the way. Oh, and starting now means you and me, we’ve got some 70 hour-long episodes to catch up on. Yikes. Daunting but so very worth the commitment. Because we are real men, and we don’t shy away from that. Right, fellas?
If you need me, I’ll be under a warm blanket, huddled up with my tabby cat, my iPad’s Amazon Instant Video app (where you can watch the first four seasons of Parenthood for free), and a box of tissues. Stop judging me, I’m a real man.
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Article originally appeared on CooperandKid.com; Credit—Photo by Art Streiber – © NBC Universal