Why is parenthood finale so early

TV Show. Episode Recaps Image. Parenthood Recap. S6 E1 Recap Parenthood season premiere recap: 'Vegas'. All rights reserved. Close this dialog window View image Jason Katims on 'Parenthood' finale montage, that surprise guest, more. It was partly that. And the other thing that I loved about that is that now Julia and Joel have a family of four children.

And the Bravermans, she grew up in a family of four children and we've been observing them for all this time and so I thought that was really a cool, poetic connection.

And it felt weird to me to cast an actor that I didn't know. You want to know who she ends up with. 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. Also, puppies. Cry factor, on a scale of one to five tears at this point in montage: Back up to five. The happy Holt family. Sarah and Hank finally do get married and, via the montage peek into their future, we see that they become a happy, consciously coupled family unit.

Okay, fine. Nevertheless: I just about died on my sofa of a Dillon Panthers heart attack at this reveal. The Friday Night Parenthood bond is solidified even further when Ryan a. Full hearts, swollen, bursting! Yet also part of my heart, or possibly my loins, wishes that Tim Riggins could have been shoehorned into all this somehow.

Cry factor, on a scale of one to five tears at this point in montage: Pretty much riding it out at five, or possibly six or seven, for the rest of life. Max Braverman graduates. First of all, watching Max hug little Nora when she runs to home plate during the Zeek Braverman memorial baseball game: Forget it. Dying, dead, hoping Jason Street speaks at my funeral because the reveal of him as eulogy deliverer would kick ass! But then the flash-forward shows us Max Braverman receiving his diploma from his dad, who, earlier in the episode, agrees to become headmaster at Chambers Academy instead of taking a job at a bottled-water company that is definitely not in any way affiliated with Poland Springs.

Mountain Springs: not even the same name, not at all. Oh, and also: This alleged c 3 organization has been trying to recruit Kristina for months and she never told Adam? None of this makes a whiff of sense, but it puts all the ducks in a row to allow future montage Max to graduate as his parents share a meaningful look of pride, thereby adding additional liquid to the tear reservoir that pools in my lap.

Cry factor, on a scale of one to five tears at this point in montage: Like I said: riding it out at five, six, or seven … hell, crying might now have become my default setting forever. Zeek telling Hank to take care of his daughter. The show's best season is its fourth, even with the increasing disconnection of the show's economic world from reality. But I think showrunner Jason Katims very cannily leaned into the fact that viewers probably wanted a bit of a break from the real world, where the economic picture for middle class families like many of the Bravermans have only gotten worse and worse.

At its best and worst, then, Parenthood was a complete fantasy. Like all fantasies, it gave us a world unlike our own, where we got to live vicariously through others for a while. It became a safe space to think about familial obligations and romantic relationships, without other prisms interfering.

As the Bravermans wandered through their catalog-spread lives, it became that much easier to set aside your own problems for a week and think about something — anything — else.

The paradox here is that, as Alan Sepinwall has noted , Parenthood is the last of the big network family dramas, and, thus, ostensibly more "realistic" than lots of other TV genres. Family dramas first saw major popularity in the '70s with The Waltons , then hit its height in the '80s and '90s with shows like thirtysomething and Party of Five.

Family dramas were softer than traditional dramas about cops and doctors and the like , because they didn't have life-or-death stakes anywhere near their centers. They were, instead, about the sorts of issues most viewers might confront in their everyday lives.

They tended to be about the minute details of everyday life, the intricacies of navigating a marriage or parent-child relationship. They had just a hint of soapiness in their stories of people forming relationships and then falling apart. They tended to confront real-life issues like alcoholism or the rise of gay rights.

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.