After last week’s excellent “Road Trip”—which your regular reviewer Todd cited as a series high, and I liked almost-but-not-quite as much—this week was bound to be somewhat of a refractory period for Parenthood, and while “Just Smile” had plenty of the sweet, spontaneous moments that typify the show, it seemed to be running almost on autopilot, plot-wise. (Autoplotlet?) After taking a break from most of the season’s ongoing storylines to pile in the car and go visit grandma, Parenthood got back down to business with progressing a couple of its ongoing stories, along with a couple of new/standalone conflicts to boot.
Where last week’s episode split the Braverman clan into cars and sent them down the road with a common objective, this week split the Bravermans into different episodes completely, with very little connective tissue among the four storylines—and left out completely several other key Bravermans. (Whither Zeek? Drew? Not so much Camille, because let’s be honest, if she had been in this episode, chances are good she wouldn’t have had much to do anyway.)
Which isn’t to say that “Just Smile” wasn’t satisfying, in that comfort-food way Parenthood so often is. It started to tie up one of this season’s snaggier plot threads, Julia and Joel’s adventures in the fetus trade; gave Adam and Crosby something else to bicker and make up about; and further established Mark as World’s Best Boyfriend No. 1 A+. Plus, another entry in the Amber vs. Adulthood saga, which is always a treat. But it felt fragmented and base-hitting, like a weekly phone check-in with far-away relatives instead of a family reunion.
Adam and Crosby’s story, while technically the A-story (if we’re going by the title, anyway), felt the most perfunctory, a goofy bit of miscommunication-meets-gotcha-journalism that nonetheless resulted in some pretty believable character moments for both. With The Luncheonette more or less chugging right along and Rachel supposedly neutralized, the writers needed to give the business-partner brothers something new to squabble about this week, in the form of a journalist from a weekly magazine who turns a feature on the studio into a fawning, cliché-ridden profile of Adam. What at first seems to be yet another instance of Crosby being a whiny little brat—He sulks! He seethes! He accuses Adam of stealing the incredibly original and not at all trite quote “Music saved my life” from him!—unfolds into a nice little examination of the brothers’ respective insecurities. Crosby wants Adam to apologize for “stealing” his interview, but what he really wants is to be (correctly) identified as the soul/heart/passion/whatever of their enterprise. Adam (correctly) maintains that he didn’t do anything wrong, but can’t deny that the article, and the way it made his family treat him, was a self-esteem boost he sorely needed. Neither is in the wrong, but what each wants from the situation is at odds with what the other wants. Luckily, Crosby has a sassy cellist client to help remind him that once music saves your life, you have to actually keep on living it—which in Crosby’s case means making some damn music and, apparently, banging a sassy cellist next week.
Like a lot of conflict on this show, Adam and Crosby’s story was wrapped up over coffee by episode’s end, while over on the other side of the episode, Sarah and Mark were cracking open a new chapter in their story (also over coffee). While this story suffered from one of my least-favorite devices—a character, in this case Sarah, spending a whole episode fretting over what someone else, Mark, might be thinking—Lauren Graham’s typically excellent work saved this from being a bunch of “I don’t know if my boyfriend likes me anymore” dithering. Granted, it’s a little more complicated than that: Following Mark dropping the baby-bomb a couple weeks back, Sarah checks in with her doctor to see if it’s even a possibility. It is, but when Mark doesn’t respond to her oh-so-subtle cues (look at the baby booties!), she panics that he’s changed his mind. Further complicating matters is the fact that Sarah doesn’t know if she even wants the thing she’s worried Mark doesn’t want. She doesn’t necessarily want to open that door, but she doesn’t want to lock it up and throw away the key, either. Luckily, despite being a less-than-serious-by-Braverman-standards poker player, Mark is basically the best person who ever lived (with the worst facial hair) and says all the right things, leaving the door cracked for the writers to go down that road in the future should they choose to. (I’m honestly not sure they will, nor that I want them too—there’s been a surplus of baby drama on this show as of late.)