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Parenthood - Season 4 thread (1 Viewer)

Greg_S_H

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Wow, that baseball game was atrocious. There were like three errors on the play to get Victor the win. "Hey, they're just kids" or badly contrived writing? The Amber/Ryan love connection is even more telegraphed than Sarah/Hank. Adam dealing with Haddie and Crosby was the best part of the episode.
 

ScottH

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Originally Posted by Greg_S_H /t/323682/parenthood-season-4-thread/60#post_3987455
Wow, that baseball game was atrocious. There were like three errors on the play to get Victor the win. "Hey, they're just kids" or badly contrived writing? The Amber/Ryan love connection is even more telegraphed than Sarah/Hank. Adam dealing with Haddie and Crosby was the best part of the episode.

Pretty much agree on all counts. And Max really botched Victor's slugging percentage...

The Julia thing was kind of out of nowhere...there was no indication prior that she was struggling with work for the last 6 months.

As much as I'm against the cancer story line, it was pretty well done this episode.
 

mattCR

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Originally Posted by Greg_S_H /t/323682/parenthood-season-4-thread/60#post_3987455
Wow, that baseball game was atrocious. There were like three errors on the play to get Victor the win. "Hey, they're just kids" or badly contrived writing? The Amber/Ryan love connection is even more telegraphed than Sarah/Hank. Adam dealing with Haddie and Crosby was the best part of the episode.

I agree. I also thought the baseball game showed off some of the things I like least; parents who feel like they have a right to bully a coach to get a kid in, etc. etc. I just didn't like anything to do with that. To be honest, I guess that's part of why I like something like "Modern Family" and shows where a smart kid enjoys just reading or something and that's "OK" Dumping to the sports as a story point for a kid just always strikes me as lazy.

I mean, they had covered how his mother was a drug addict and he had been basically taken out of a bad environment. Wouldn't directions of things like: "he hides in his room and reads?" Be a storyline that could have been just as interesting.. "well, we want to encourage him to read and read, we're OK with that.." or anything else but "let's get a minority kid who had a hard life into baseball that he's terrible at!" Or just anything else.. the problem is, they keep going back to really old tropes to tell a story, which is something the first season, and half of the second season really avoided. Now it seems like all we get is regurgitated storylines from other shows slightly altered to fit this cast.

But the Adam bit works because he's so good at playing it.. so nothing to say but that.
 

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I too, felt the baseball game was poorly done. From Zeke's cornering the coach, to the family shouting, to the very predictable game-winning 'home-run'.
As for Julia's story line, does anyone in this family do anything moderately? Were her only choices 100% commitment or quit? Isn't there a middle-ground? Although, it doesn't sound like the best run firm to begin with. If the account she screwed up were that major, shouldn't there be more than one person in the firm with a CALENDAR? You know - an office manager, senior partner, one of her assistants? If I ran a firm, and I had a multi-million dollar account, and there was a deadline, I'd have several people checking to make sure the deadline was met.
The cancer story continues to be well done. I liked the way both phone calls with Haddie were handled - the cluelessness of the first one, and the honesty of the second one.
Not happy about the Amber/Ryan story - its too 'neat'. I mean, she just has a conversation about not meeting the right guy, and, lo and behold, an eligible guy shows up.
David
 

Greg_S_H

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Yep. "I'm just waiting for the right person." Cut to Zeek introducing Ryan to the clan, and emphasizing Amber by forgetting her. And you're right, they didn't earn the Julia story. At least they apparently made her day of skipping work to figuratively hold Victor's hand come back to bite her--or I assume that was a key day, since they covered it in the recap. Does Joel have a steady job now, or are they totally screwed without her income? I'm sure the placement agency won't be too thrilled about her ability to take care of Victor now.
If Mark's going to stick around, I wish he would either shave or grow it out. It looked like Sarah woke up with a drowned rat with that scraggle.
 

Mike Frezon

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Originally Posted by Greg_S_H /t/323682/parenthood-season-4-thread/60#post_3987504
Does Joel have a steady job now, or are they totally screwed without her income?

That makes a point. The writers have really stopped trying.

Cancer concerns and feel-good youth baseball moments are the best they can muster.
 

Greg_S_H

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And this one was written by Katims. At its best, Friday Night Light (and Parenthood S1) felt more real and honest than any other show. Parenthood can be good, but it is now a conventional show. We've pretty much departed from reality at this point.
 

Mike Frezon

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That's just it.

We've got all these contrivances...yet we don't know enough about a vital character (Joel) to know just how impactful the events currently happening to Julia will be on their lives.

That's sloppy. I was wondering the same thing as the Julia business was playing out. Do they have another income? Is Joel a stay-at-home dad? We don't even know. (Or, at least, can't be sure.)

But we are being hit over the head with Amber/Ryan and Sarah/Hank. Max is running for a school office (even without legit petition signatures?), that Victor sure is a bad egg (but with a heart of gold), Zeek and Camille keep plodding along, Crosby is growing up, etc. Blah, blah, blah.

Peter Krauss and Monica Potter are single-handedly keeping the show interesting with some terrific work with lame, hackneyed material. It tugs at your heart strings--sure--but they are playing it with grace and sincerity.
 

mattCR

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Originally Posted by Mike Frezon /t/323682/parenthood-season-4-thread/60#post_3987543
That's just it.

We've got all these contrivances...yet we don't know enough about a vital character (Joel) to know just how impactful the events currently happening to Julia will be on their lives.

That's sloppy. I was wondering the same thing as the Julia business was playing out. Do they have another income? Is Joel a stay-at-home dad? We don't even know. (Or, at least, can't be sure.)

But we are being hit over the head with Amber/Ryan and Sarah/Hank. Max is running for a school office (even without legit petition signatures?), that Victor sure is a bad egg (but with a heart of gold), Zeek and Camille keep plodding along, Crosby is growing up, etc. Blah, blah, blah.

Peter Krauss and Monica Potter are single-handedly keeping the show interesting with some terrific work with lame, hackneyed material. It tugs at your heart strings--sure--but they are playing it with grace and sincerity.

Well, last year the thought was that Joel was re-opening his construction business, and if you remember one of his first projects was the house for Crosby. At this point, I have NO idea where any of that went.
Then again, they did basically the same thing with the Aspiring and "promising" playwright who would "have a future" who I guess just totally gave up on that.
 

Greg_S_H

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That was pretty much the FNL season two murder storyline, the playwright thing was. "Kinda lame, nobody liked it, let's move on."
 

Patrick Sun

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Wonder what costs more, hiring Ray Romano, and build up a studio and darkroom, or having to deal with the trappings of staging plays for Sarah's subplots?
 

Mike Frezon

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Originally Posted by Patrick Sun /t/323682/parenthood-season-4-thread/60#post_3987730
Wonder what costs more, hiring Ray Romano, and build up a studio and darkroom, or having to deal with the trappings of staging plays for Sarah's subplots?
I would think Romano can't come cheap. After all, "everybody loves" him!
 

ScottH

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Originally Posted by Mike Frezon /t/323682/parenthood-season-4-thread/60#post_3987743
I would think Romano can't come cheap.

Apparently, he came cheaper than Richard Dreyfuss.
 

mattCR

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Originally Posted by ScottH /t/323682/parenthood-season-4-thread/60#post_3987768

Apparently, he came cheaper than Richard Dreyfuss.

I think the bigger problem is that having her as a playwright would mean a bigger cast or an ongoing story that would be hard to support. But her sudden loss of interest in it just adds to her as a flake storyline stuff.

While we're at it, I'll add to the Zeke becoming a dottering-man bit; did we even remotely resolve the storyline of him owning a strip mall property that he couldn't get out of and was teetering on bankruptcy? He ran off the one investor at a loss and then.. nothing.

This is a show where there are a TON of dead ends. And I don't know what to make of that.
 

Mike Frezon

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mattCR said:
And I don't know what to make of that.
Just what I've been saying: Lazy writers who underestimate their audience.

What makes this such a shame is all the GOOD things the writers have done with this show (and certainly the cast). If only they weren't assuming that the audience would blindly accept all these plot holes, this show could be a landmark for evening dramas.

They were/are thisclose to greatness.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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Wow, that baseball game was atrocious. There were like three errors on the play to get Victor the win. "Hey, they're just kids" or badly contrived writing?
I completely agree. Sometimes the little win is so much more powerful than the big win. Watching that scene, I was reminded of an episode of "Freaks & Geeks" where one of the geeks finally convinced the gym teacher to let him pick the teams so he wouldn't always be last. He ends up making a spectacular diving catch to get the out against the team full of jocks. Everybody on the geek team's hugging and cheering each other, and then you realize it was the first out of the first inning. They're still going to get crushed by the jocks. But because the expectation was that it couldn't be done, it was still a huge win.
The baseball game would have been so much more effective, in my opinion, if Victor's victory had merely been hitting the ball and getting on first. As Matt said, the game winning homerun is just such an overused trope at this point.
The Julia thing was kind of out of nowhere...there was no indication prior that she was struggling with work for the last 6 months.
I actually really liked that storyline. I don't think it's uncommon that when you're juggling too many balls for them all to just drop at once. It answers the question that her sitting in her car all day for Victor raised for me: how can she do this without missing a beat? Answer, she can't.
The cancer story continues to be well done. I liked the way both phone calls with Haddie were handled - the cluelessness of the first one, and the honesty of the second one.
Me too. Far and away the best best part of the episode. When I was in college, my father collapsed walking up big hill and got rushed to the hospital for emergency open heart surgery. My mother called me from the waiting room in tears, not making coherent sentences, just totally lost. I have never felt so agonizingly helpless in my entire life. My mom needed me, and I was hundreds of miles away. I didn't know if I'd ever speak to my dad again. It tears through me again just thinking of it. I've yet to experience anything worse than being too far away when the family was in crisis.
The phone call between Haddie and Adam, where they said all of the things they couldn't say in front of Kristina, should win Peter Krause an Emmy. Just one of those moments that's exactly right; the situation has enough drama so they just let it play naturally. Absolutely the right call.
Does Joel have a steady job now, or are they totally screwed without her income?
They've shown that he's doing contracting work out of the house a few times this season, probably in preparation for what happened in tonight's episode, but I doubt it's enough for them to keep up on the mortgage and taxes of that very high-end house in a very high-end real estate market. One thing I really hope they do with this storyline is move Joel away from being solely a stay-at-home dad. I don't think he needs to be a "Leave to Beaver" sole breadwinner, but have him be the one that steps up professionally.
I think the bigger problem is that having her as a playwright would mean a bigger cast or an ongoing story that would be hard to support. But her sudden loss of interest in it just adds to her as a flake storyline stuff.
I completely agree. It was totally in character for Sarah to sort of flake on that. I read an interview with Katims where he said the reason they got away from that is because it was pulling the Sarah character away from the reality of who she was, which is someone struggling on the margins. Every time they took her to a place where financial concerns weren't in the picture, it just didn't feel organic to where she is in her life. I think that was the right call.
I also think it's totally in-character for Sarah's guilty reaction to having been kissed by Hank being: let's move in together right now! She just makes continually awful decisions with her personal life.
 

Greg_S_H

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I think early in the episode I was ready to complain about the foolishness of making Drew move, and of course the Max thing is fairly hard to believe, but I was mostly won over by the episode. Lying to Haddie is not okay, though. You can't send someone off relieved because of something that isn't true.
 

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Meh. I thought it was looking good for the cancer story line to come to a close when the doctor first started talking. Not sure what the point is to drag the heartache and sadness on even longer.
 

mattCR

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The Max story has, for the last season or so, been really off track for me. I know we have new participants here, so I'll give a bit of a bio.. I have an autistic son, have participated in groups, etc. Max's issues throughout the first few seasons don't in any way lead to him having the social skills or interest in doing something so socially oriented. For a bit, I thought this would go in an interesting direction, that Max was being made fun of by his peers who were sponsoring him. But they dropped that storyline almost immediately. Instead, Max wins class president. That's I think the biggest problem the last two season they keep trying for the home run ball where a bunt single would have been better.
I would have found it far more believable for Max to decide not to do it, to get concerned about speaking in front of a huge group, or to lose the election but accomplish a lot by getting his issues out there. Having him win creates weird follow up eps.

In the end, I think somewhere in the middle of last season this show really lost it's rudder. Max was a kid who needed full para professional support and a special school. Now, he's not only mainstreamed, but he's a part of student government?
 

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