Showrunner Jason Katims talks to BuzzFeed News about how the beloved NBC series came to a close, those Friday Night Lights references, and the importance of baseball for the Bravermans. WARNING: DO NOT READ ON IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE PARENTHOOD SERIES FINALE!
Justin Lubin / NBC
The final six minutes of Parenthood have no dialogue. Instead, the only thing fans of the NBC family drama hear is an acoustic cover, courtesy of Sam Beam and Rhiannon Giddens, of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," the theme song that introduced the Bravermans for 103 episodes — and a lyric of which ("May god bless and keep you always") serves as the series finale's title.
Those last minutes of the episode center on a baseball game in Braverman family patriarch Zeek's (Craig T. Nelson) memory interspersed with flash-forwards that depict how each individual family unit progresses. And any fan of Parenthood showrunner Jason Katims' previous series Friday Night Lights was likely particularly moved by those last six precious minutes, seeing as FNL said its good-bye in a similar fashion.
"The one thing that I think did inspire me from Friday Night Lights was that there's a version of the flash-forward at the end when you look a little bit into the futures of everybody," Katims told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview a few days before the Parenthood series finale aired. "Obviously, it's a very different ending. But I did think, in both shows, the one thing I really wanted to do in the ending was not only feel like I gave the show a satisfying ending, but I really loved the idea of getting into where everybody was heading next."
Unlike Friday Night Lights, which ended on a high note with the East Dillon Lions winning the Texas state championship football game, the Parenthood series finale went out bittersweetly in the wake of Zeek's death. Katims said he wanted to ensure fans didn't only cry tears of sorrow during the last episode, but that they smiled as well.
"The whole final season of Parenthood was about Zeek's passing, and I knew that's where we were going to head toward the end of the finale episode. To me, the flash-forwards helped for us to have that ending, which was a very tough thing, but still give the sense that, hopefully, the ending was ultimately uplifting because it's all about how life goes on," he said. "When you saw all these families continuing to grow and new families forming and you saw everybody sort of thriving, I thought it struck a very nice balance between the sadness of losing Zeek."
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