For The Someday Book

I’ve only seen two episodes, but I am already hooked on the new NBC show Parenthood. At first it was just my love of Lauren Graham and Peter Krause, but now it’s bigger than that.

I realized in the first five minutes that I was exactly the target demographic for the show—an educated, thirty-something parent passionately concerned about my child’s future, filled with anxiety about my ability to balance my work and family life, wanting my child to have the best of everything and fearful of my ability to offer it. The show is even set in Berkeley, where I went to seminary. It’s like someone took an idealized version of what I might like my life to be and turned it into a show.

Except it’s not completely idealized. The writers and actors manage to capture on the screen the anxiety and competitiveness and floundering of contemporary parenting, along with the heart-wrenching love we all feel for our children. Most of the television I watch is an escape from my life. Parenthood hooks me because it draws me toward my life, in all its angst and foolishness and ego and even the beauty and honesty I yearn for.

I watched tonight after a long and exhausting day. Throughout the episode, I felt my tension rise with the tension of the show. Will the child get into the right school? Oh no, she’s having a bad mom moment in public! How can even the best-intentioned parents still blow it sometimes? After a few minutes I considered turning it off, because I feared it would keep me awake and tense about my own life. When a particularly tense and poignant moment broke into a commercial, I expected the show to be over until the next week. It was an ideal cliffhanger—relationships strained, events incomplete, tension intact to hook the viewer for the next episode. But I looked at my watch and there were eight minutes left.

Then I realized what was coming. The same thing as the week before. I thought it was just something for the pilot, but now I see it will likely be a weekly trope. A closing scene with the whole extended family together, enjoying each other’s company, playing or eating or laughing or working together as though their problems have all resolved, or at least been set aside for a temporary reprieve. Showing us, the audience at home, that everything is okay as long as we love each other, no matter how many mistakes we make or how impossibly imperfect life is.

And I cried. Just like I did last week. I cried because I felt all the tension of the show, of my day and of my own family wash away. I cried because it gave me just what I wanted—a camera shot of the whole mess of family and relationships with a wide enough angle to see the big picture of love, and music that makes everything beautiful and whole again.

It’s easy to make those moments happen in the last eight minutes of a television episode. Sometimes those vicarious, created moments can wash over into feelings of peace and contentment in our own lives. It’s much harder to find those moments in real life, but they do happen. The lighting is not perfect, the houses are not designer, the people are not slim and fantastic, but the beauty is even more amazing, and the warmth and laughter and love are real.

And on the days when the real-life moments seem impossible, I’ll take eight minutes of television to remind me.