'Parenthood' ends with life, death, love
Parenthood said goodbye Thursday as the Bravermans welcomed new additions, dealt with a huge loss and, as always, moved forward as one big family.
"What we wanted to show was that this family was going to continue to grow and thrive," Executive Producer Jason Katims says.
The NBC drama's finale, May God Bless and Keep You Always (lyrics from the show's Forever Young theme song), focused on the wedding of Sarah Braverman (Lauren Graham) and Hank Rizzoli (Ray Romano), which was moved up in time to make sure that Sarah's ailing father, Zeek (Craig T. Nelson), would be able to attend.
The episode featured another child for Joel (Sam Jaeger) and Sarah's sister Julia (Erika Christensen), as adopted son Victor's half-sister joined the family, which grew one child bigger in a flash-forward sequence at the end of the episode. In that same future peek, Crosby Braverman's wife, Jasmine (Joy Bryant), is pregnant in a scene showing them as happy proprietors of The Luncheonette recording studio, Crosby's (Dax Shepard) longtime dream achieved without needing his older brother's help.
"Boy, we did good, didn't we, Camille?" Zeek commented to his wife (Bonnie Bedelia), while looking at their sprawling clan posing for wedding photos.
All that good news, however, was tempered by the death of Zeek, who passed away quietly in a chair near the end of the episode. He had decided earlier not to have risky heart surgery that might have prolonged his life.
"I felt like it was the Zeek story this year, a family dealing with mortality. We wanted the season to be about telling that story and less about the shock of it, more about what the experience would be like for this family," Katims says.
"The show has always been this very uplifting and aspirational show," he says. "We didn't want the end to be a total bummer. There's an ending but there are lots of new beginnings."
The drama, which ran for six seasons, closed with happy resolutions for many characters. Adam (Peter Krause), the eldest of Zeek and Camille's four children, took over running Chambers Academy from his wife, Kristina (Monica Potter), and finally found and embraced the passion that had eluded him in an otherwise successful career.
Their son, Max (Max Burkholder), whose growth after a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome has been a major storyline, found success on a couple of levels, getting a job as the wedding photographer and dancing with a girl at the reception. In a scene at the end that looks at the Bravermans' futures, a proud Adam hands Max his high school diploma.
Parenthood, inspired by the 1989 film of the same name, was not a big ratings hit, but it has enjoyed the support of a loyal and extremely devoted audience. Both Katims and Krause say they hope the broadcast networks will embrace family dramas in the future. As for Parenthood specifically, both say they would be happy to revisit the Bravermans at some point, in something shorter than a regular TV series.
"I think it's nice to leave series alone" after they end, Krause says. "But, on this particular one, I'd be open to getting together with these people and doing something again."
After Zeek's death late in the episode, the family mourned and celebrated the family patriarch, joining together to spread his ashes on a baseball field before going to bat in a fun, family game. The plan was to film the ball field scene in San Francisco, the region where the Bravermans live, but a storm there forced it to be relocated to Los Angeles, where the series has been filmed.
"I loved getting to go out and play baseball. That was my last day of work," Krause says. The fun of playing ball together with fellow cast members combined with the ending of the show made for "a really bittersweet day, a lot of hugging and tears."
More than half the cast finished work on the series that day, Katims says. "They were having fun. It was a very joyous day and a very poignant day. It was a great experience to have the entire cast together."