A review of last night's "Parenthood" coming up just as soon as I unleash the fever... Parenthood (whether the concept or the TV show) isn't a competition, but I couldn't help noticing that the parent doing the best job in "Perchance to Dream" is Crosby (and Jasmine, too). Adam freaks out over Haddie's sexuality, Sarah again tries to project all of her regrets onto Amber, and Julia took the broken mug issue way too far to overcompensate for the old lawyer=liar saw. Crosby, meanwhile, had no problem interrupting his date with Jasmine to help Jabbar through his fear of pooping in strange places, and he and Jasmine both recognized that they don't want to send the wrong message to the kid if their attempt to go from co-parents to couple doesn't work out.
Now, I'm not complaining about any of the others this week. Some of the most interesting stories on this show involve parents screwing up, as we saw with the scene where Haddie called Adam on his double-standard treatment of her. But just as no one would have expected Dax Shepard to give one of the best performances among this cast, who would have thought after the first few episodes that we might get a night where Crosby was so much more on his game than his siblings?
I don't want to give short shrift to Kristina's decision, by the way. The whole work/kids dilemma is a familiar one, in life and on TV, and Kristina has the added complication of a special needs kid. As much as she enjoyed her time back in grown-up world, I can understand her reluctance to go back full-time not long after finding out about Max's Asperger's (and not long before Haddie goes to college). And it was interesting to watch Adam throughout that scene, because you could tell he was trying to do right by his wife even as he very clearly didn't want her to go work for Sundra from "Survivor: Cook Islands."
"Perchance to Dream" was one of the show's more thematically and tonally consistent episodes. It was also a fairly light one, not only with Adam's goofy dancing, but Sarah and Amber listening in horror to Mike O'Malley's poems about Sarah's va-jay-jay, everyone else's reaction to Julia's cordoned-off area, and Drew's reaction to Haddie taking off her bra in the kitchen. Plus, Run-DMC! (Which gives me an excuse to link to the original video, with Penn & Teller.)
What did everybody else think?