Zeek Braverman’s Sandals

NBC’s Parenthood ended last week after six seasons of varying lengths, and I cried my face off several times during the hour. The finale was full of well-played, hard-earned moments of resolution most of the show’s characters would never have guessed at six seasons ago. I suppose you could argue that they all received unrealistically happy endings (even Camille, who got to roam the streets of Paris after all), but it’s not like Parenthood was ever about a gang of misfit antiheroes to begin with.

The show was never perfect, and I always liked it more for that. On the surface, it seemed like just another series about a mostly white family and their upper-middle-class problems, but all along it took plenty of chances. For instance, we were dared, almost weekly, to give up on these people, to find them insufferable, to not return for the next episode. I have no doubt a good number of people did just that. (Most TV recap comments for Parenthood are people venting about the parental indulgences of Adam and Kristina.) But for those who stuck around, we were given something rare on television — and on network television: stories that took their time, and whose characters felt very real, and where it was sometimes shocking how selfish those characters could be.

Again: they may be all-too real for some. While I’ve been mostly immune to the Bravermans-are-so-annoying sentiment that regularly makes its way around social media come Friday mornings, there’s something to be said for writing characters who don’t corner a heart surgeon with shouted questions as he’s trying to get back to saving lives.

To compare Parenthood to its predecessor (and showrunner-sharer) Friday Night Lights is misunderstand both shows. I rewatched several chunks of FNL recently, as my kids made their way through it, and I have to say: there are plenty of times when that show’s characters are every bit as narcissistic and annoying as Parenthood‘s, yet we’re more willing to cut them slack. Why, because they’re lower-middle-class or even poor, while most of Parenthood‘s characters are in the upper brackets? I have to tell you, I’ve lived among the rich and I’ve lived among the dirt-poor, and problems are problems. Anyway, it’s a weird thing for most people who watch Parenthood to complain about those white, moneyed lives. I’m just swinging in the dark here, but who else, exactly, is watching Parenthood?

But when I think about Parenthood in total, as we now have it, the thing I think of more than anything is Zeek Braverman’s Birkenstocks. I know there are websites devoted to sussing out the color codes of Breaking Bad, but Zeek’s Birks are my favorite item of clothing on television.

I remember seeing them pretty early on, and the sight of them threw me immediately: Wasn’t this the show based on the Ron Howard film? And wasn’t this the character based on the one played by Jason Robards? (In that version, he is Frank Buckman.) So what’s with the hippie shoes?

As far as I can recall, no one in the show ever mentions them, not unlike Zeek’s mysterious career. Yet they appear again and again; they’re not his only footwear — the pilot features him in brown, closed-toe Birks like you see on compounding pharmacists — but they’re a constant. As the series goes on, we learn that Zeek is a Vietnam Vet who attended West Point and loves football and the Grateful Dead. He has anger issues. He loves his kids, yet worries he failed as a father. He came up in the ’60s, but was just a little too old to have been a hippie — having been born just before the post-WWII Baby Boom, Zeek was there in the Bay Area to see it all happen, yet clearly felt an invisible wall between himself and the generation that was not-so-quietly seizing all the power.

Most of this is unsaid, by the way, which is quite a feat for a show where no character ever has an unspoken thought. I’ve sussed out the generational stuff because Zeek happens to be just a year older than my own father, and while my dad didn’t go to war, he too had already been in the military and begun a family by the time the Summer of Love rolled around. (Zeek, for the record, also carries a remarkably similar posture to my dad.)

But the fuzzy details are appropriate for this character, who looms so large in his kids’ lives — for better and for worse — yet who’s actively struggling to find his own place in the time he has left on Earth. Zeek is a guy who grew old knowing exactly who he was — only now he’s maybe not so sure about that. Parenthood never resolves the character of Zeek Braverman in the way other shows or movies might have been tempted to do. To be clear, I like that he’s never drawn with bold lines. I like that I’m never 100% certain of where Zeek and his four kids stand with each other.

Camille, by contrast, is pretty clear: she was a wife and mother, she sacrificed a shit-ton for her family over the years, and now she’s going to take back some ownership of her life. Camille makes pretty bold moves that all further the solidification of her identity: claiming the attic as her art space, going on that extended trip to Italy, selling the big old house and moving to San Francisco. But Zeek’s life — in the show — is full of bad moves and half-hearted stabs at things. He cheats on Camille. He gets involved with newly returned war veterans. He gets the acting bug and starts talking about trying out for more commercial work. He works on restoring a car in order to avoid dealing with his wife’s needs. He loses a bunch of their money in a bad real-estate investment. (Those last two: it turns out he’s been restoring the car for his grandson; and we never hear about the ill-fated building after season one, so let’s assume it was the victim of network notes.)

Zeek is a pretty remarkable character, for any medium. He’s such a mass of contradictions and regrets and stubborn ideas that he’s ultimately the richest character on a show flooded with real-seeming people. He clearly thought being loud and firm and definitive with his family was all he needed to do, that that would somehow have formed an identity for him. But in the end, I’m not sure we know who he ever was, because he never knew. And that’s not sloppy writing, by the way, that’s the opposite: because he never knew. Meaning the writers are fully aware of his lack of awareness, if that makes sense. It’s one thing to watch a character and think: that’s a bag of quirks, not a person. Or Rick Grimes on The Walking Dead; I’ve watched that guy for years and I have no clue who he is, because the writers don’t either. It’s another thing entirely to watch a character and think: this is a man who is dead certain until he isn’t, who’s become less sure of himself as he grows older, not more so.

And so I come back to those Birkenstocks. Zeek is a guy who’s supposed to wear, I don’t know, tough old workboots. Yet, he hunches around in Birkenstocks — and not the half-committed, thong-type ones, either, but the ones with the big strap across the top and nothing for the ankle, the ones that scream “dirty hippie.” His kids don’t make fun of them, because they know beneath the bluster he bruises like fruit. And he doesn’t even know why he wears the goddamn things, except he likes them. And maybe that’s actually a Northern California thing, the tough veteran in the peacenik footwear, and then maybe Zeek is literally a man of his era, a living embodiment of the irreconcilable contradictions of the pragmatic and the personal, the Diggers and the Hawks, a man caught between the Baby Boom and the generation that was made immediately irrelevant by the Baby Boom. Or maybe Camille gave him the Birks and he wears them because he wants her to see him wearing them. Or maybe they were just a deliberate addition of the writers, one tiny detail to keep you from forming too neat a picture of this guy. (Consider, too, the spelling of his name. “Zeke” the standard version, conveys a certain hard-edged personality. “Zeek” is weirder, more individual, almost freaky, tougher to pin down.)

All of these options are possible, and the fact that we don’t know doesn’t bother me one bit. In fact, it excites me. It means I’ve spent time with a special character.

I will miss Parenthood, but I will miss Zeek Braverman most of all.