It's just one moment on screen, and I really liked the idea of having someone who I had a connection to. I knew Scott Porter was also a fan of Parenthood and obviously because of our connection via Friday Night Lights, that was a huge factor. I felt comfortable calling up a star like him to ask him to do this role that had no lines and just walk in at the end of the series and do it. It was incredible. The moment he heard from us, he instantly said yes. No questions.
I just felt like for some reason Scott felt like the perfect person. Nelson in as many scenes as possible. I thought he was doing such incredible work. And also I've been through the experience, as many of us have, of losing a parent and it wasn't something that happened overnight. It was something that went on for a long period of time and you go through a lot.
I wanted to tell that story. We told two big episodes that were big emergency episodes of him being rushed to the hospital. I didn't want that to be the kind of feeling we are left with at the end of the show. I knew it would be really sad that Zeek passed away. But I didn't want it to be the only thing we took away from the show. I think the show is ultimately, has always been ultimately uplifting, even though we have dealt with very, very difficult material.
When we started breaking specifically what those last few episodes would look like, I kept being bothered by the fact that the series would end with somebody dying. By juxtaposing the death against the family continuing to expand and thrive, that would give it the music of life.
It was kind of inspired by the end of Friday Night Lights. In the final episode, we did flash-forwards to all of our characters and where they ended up. Did you come up with a backstory for how he and Amber would have met? We had this idea that we wanted to see Amber down the road a few years. The original thought I had was actually to shoot the scene of the first time the two of them saw each other. And he came in to do it, and it was magic.
And in that same scene, he acknowledges Sarah getting married and moving on. They all, inevitably, had an arc where somebody got cancer usually in the fourth season, weirdly. This sort of small-scale realism was a slight twist on the sorts of independent films and kitchen-sink stage plays that had dug into the realities of American working- and middle-class lives.
The family drama offered a glossier spin on that material, even as the country itself was returning to one where more and more families lived paycheck to paycheck. Thus, the end of Parenthood marks the end of another era — the era when a family like the Bravermans even felt possible in a dramatic context. Now, by and large, these big, sprawling family shows forthrightly confront class issues as on ABC Family's often excellent Switched at Birth or they're comedies, where the burden of adhering to reality can be much looser as on Modern Family.
Parenthood, then, ends the era when the white, upper middle-class existence defined the existence of enough TV viewers that even a low-rated show about such a thing could survive or even thrive on the TV schedule. As if to further prove this point, the biggest show in years is Fox's Empire , a huge, over-the-top soap about a black family of hip hop moguls.
It's a crazy soap first and foremost, sure. But it's also a family drama — just one that looks nothing like any other show that label might be appended to. I don't want to damn Parenthood with faint praise. When it was on, it was one of my favorite shows on TV , and in its finest moments, it got at a kind of emotional truth few other shows could touch.
The moment, for instance, when Julia realizes she won't be adopting the baby she thought she would near the end of season three still guts me. But I'm also appreciative of the way that the series finale pulled back and back from the characters, until they seemed like a collection of stock figures moved into positions around a diorama.
The series of flash-forwards Katims employed at the episode's end interspersed with Zeek's funeral let us know that the Bravermans would be okay, would all go on to live out their dreams and have happy, successful lives. In a way, that's comforting, isn't it? In its final few seasons, Parenthood sometimes seemed almost heedless in its pursuit of the idea that if you just followed your dreams, everything would be okay.
As we too often see in our own lives, that's just not true, but that it could be true for some fictional characters it was easy to deeply identify with could be very satisfying. The audience for Parenthood was hugely committed to the show, even if it was, ultimately, a pretty small one.
Ironically, the show is ending because a series with this big of a cast proved too expensive to keep renewing, even though the series' loyal viewership has gone from tiny to mediocre to downright respectable as network TV has collapsed around it.
That audience will almost certainly be satisfied with this ending, which leaves the characters in wonderful places. But that finale is also filled with a kind of mournfulness for a world that has passed on, right out from under the show's feet. There's probably room to do a family drama about the issues more and more Americans face now. That show probably won't look anything like Parenthood , but it was sure nice to visit the show's world for six seasons. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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