Maybe I was just in a particularly cranky mood while watching the latest Parenthood episode last night, but I could have cared less about Crosby’s stupid boat, with which Crosby said he’d been in “a relationship” for a long time.
I felt myself saying the same things to the TV that his sister Julia was saying: “Sell the boat. You’re a grown-up.”
Sacrificing living on the boat to be able to live with and marry a smart, beautiful and talented woman and their cute-as-a-button son isn’t that big of a sacrifice. I so want Crosby to stop acting like he’s 22 and fresh out of school, and quit whining that nobody cared about how hard it was for him to sell the boat. Watching him during this episode was like nails on a chalkboard….
Also horrendously grating was the Gordon-Sarah story where Sarah acted like a sullen teen who’d been caught by her parents staying out all night as she attempted to sneak into the house and pretend as though she hadn’t been out all night sleeping with her overly slick boss in the back of a limo. How hard was it, really, for her to text her panicked kids or make a quick phone call to let them know she was okay? Forget the baloney about how, when she woke up and realized it was something like 4:30 in the morning, she didn’t want to “bother” anyone by calling at that hour. After receiving a billion texts and calls, she could’ve just texted back.
By contrast there was uber-responsible Adam, for whom I felt a great deal of empathy in this episode.
The scene in the grocery store was well done, with its jumpy camera-work, as viewers saw things from Adam’s perspective as his tension level rose incrementally, making the tie he wore around his neck seem like a rope closing off his air supply. As he pushed the cart, Peter Krause did a subtle, fabulous job of trying to maintain his cool while Max was pestering him about buying an armload of potato chips. Meanwhile, his father was incessantly picking away at Adam, insisting that he do something about the fact that Sarah’s shoe-clicker idea had been rejected, prodding Adam to try to make it all better for her at the company where Adam just had to fire seven people while his boss was off drinking and plotting out ways to make moves on his sister.
When Max realized that the customer in front of them had 17 items in the “10 Items or Less” lane, you just knew it was going to get messy. As Max proceeded to roughly remove the excess items from the guy’s order and toss them aside, I was fully expecting an ugly Max flip-out where Adam would apologetically try to smooth things over for his son, his boisterous father, the obnoxious customer and the timid check-out clerk, the way he tries to do with everyone and everything in his life.
I did not expect Adam to punch the guy in the face. However when I heard the customer refer to Max as a “retard,” I too, like Kristina later, wanted Adam to punch him in the face, the Papa Bear protecting his young. It was uncharacteristic, yet completely understandable.
Deciding to have Adam not tell Kristina about the incident until the end of the episode was an interesting decision (would’ve been more interesting had he had not told her at all). It seemed as though Adam had wanted to try to make sense of the fact that he’d actually enjoyed popping the guy in the face, a revelation that really disturbed him. Does this mean that Adam’s going to slowly unravel, seek therapy or act out in some other fashion, I don’t know.
But it was refreshing to hear Adam confess that he’s angry all the time and hates feeling as though he’s not in control of his own life, despite the fact that he has a decent job, a smart wife, a beautiful home, children and a close (though terribly pushy) family who all perceive him as their leader. On TV dramas of lesser quality, Adam’s anger would be neatly resolved in an episode or two and his overall malaise would quickly disappear as they moved on to another story. I hope that’s not the case with Parenthood and that they explore this story arc in more depth.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Nov 10, 2010 @ 11:42 EST5EDT
