Parenthood – When mean girls attack

Maybe it’s because I live in Massachusetts where, earlier this year, a teenager, who was new to her high school, was, according to media reports and a local prosecutor, brutally harassed by a group of girls who were angry that the teen had dated one of their ex-boyfriends. The teen felt so tormented that she committed suicide.

Those real life events kept coming to my mind as I watched this episode of Parenthood, making me feel more than a little uncomfortable as it unfolded.

The story about Haddie Braverman and Amber Holt, who’s new to the local high school, felt very similar to the Massachusetts Phoebe Prince case, except that Haddie and Amber are cousins and we’re somewhere in the middle of this saga.

In previous episodes of Parenthood, Haddie had broken up with her boyfriend Steve after he’d pressured her about having sex. Haddie didn’t want to and consulted her cousin Amber for advice and Amber said she shouldn’t do what she didn’t want to do. The seeds of discord, however, were sown when, after Haddie broke up with him, Steve began confiding in Amber. The two seemed to click, despite Amber’s feeble attempts to try and distance herself from him out of loyalty to her cousin. Amber and Steve wound up sleeping together, a fact that Amber admitted to Haddie in last week’s episode as she apologized profusely.

In this week’s episode, “Team Braverman,” Haddie, at least for me, stopped being a sympathetic character and seemed like a whiny brat who stood by and watched as her friends encircled her cousin on school grounds, loudly called Amber a “bitch” and a “slut” and tossed a sports drink into Amber’s face. Amber, who begged Haddie to discuss this in private and not in front of the crowd that was forming, started to lose it as she looked into the menacing sea of angry faces. Amber shoved the drink-tossing girl away from her and yelled, “Leave me alone!” and made the mistake of shoving Haddie as well which only made Haddie angry and she started shoving and fighting with Amber.

Parents were summoned to the principal’s office and an argument ensued between the adults in the hallway when Haddie summed up the situation thusly, “Amber told me to break up with Steve and then she had sex with him.”

The following day, the word “whore” was painted on Amber’s locker in red, which finally ticked off Amber’s mother Sarah enough that she showed a cell phone image of the graffiti to Haddie’s parents, Adam and Kristina. As Sarah asked them to look into this — an act which Sarah accused of Haddie of committing — saying that Amber was new to the school and that this kind of thing would damage Amber’s reputation, Kristina was incredulous: “Amber slept with Steve, you guys are forgetting something really important here, and we’re trying to help Amber through it?”

Which led to this arctic exchange:

Sarah: Imagine if someone wrote ‘whore’ on Haddie’s locker.

Kristina: It wouldn’t happen because Haddie’s not.

Um, who broke up with whom?

The harassment continued the next day as Amber was loudly called a “ho” by Haddie’s friends in the cafeteria. (“Oh look, it’s the ho. Hey ho!”) Amber fled and was followed by Steve who offered her a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.

“I can’t even exist without getting made fun of or called a name or pushed around,” Amber said, to which Steve replied that he was sorry she was taking all the abuse for this. Then he initiated a kiss, which Haddie witnessed. Though Haddie had finally asked her friends to stop being so mean to Amber, her emotional pain at seeing Amber and her ex-boyfriend Steve kissing simply paled in comparison to the pain Amber was feeling at being targeted, humiliated and harassed by Haddie’s pack of mean girls.

This episode also chilled my feelings toward Kristina’s character quite a bit. Yes, I get the mama bear protecting her cub thing, believe me. I don’t blame Kristina for getting angry on behalf of her child, but she shouldn’t have made excuses for the locker business, should’ve talked to her daughter about how this situation sucked but explained that you can’t escalate up like this because that would be called harassment, plain and simple. Adam was the only one who seemed to be level-headed about this, though he was awfully cruel to his sister when she didn’t attend his autism fundraiser. (To be fair, Adam didn’t know the full extent of the torment his niece was experiencing at school.)

What did you think of this Haddie-Amber storyline? About their parents’ response to it?

Also, care to weigh in on the story of Julia being pressured into bringing homemade soup to a woman who had breast augmentation surgery? Sorry, don’t care about a bit about that woman’s sob story. Demanding homemade food from a crazy-busy working parent and not just graciously accepting anything people are willing to give you, is thoroughly obnoxious and arrogant.

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on May 19, 2010 @ 11:30 EST5EDT