The Parker family is not an American family to use or, seeing the number of dysfunctional families that populate our television, maybe it is. But their adventures, which begin with a crazy road trip from Syracuse to Florida and which will take them in successive seasons to New York, Alaska or even Russia itself, mix the humor of blow and blow, the embarrassment of others and the thick tone with a indelible family affection.
Find out why you’d want to share a seat with the Parkers: Nate (Jason Jones), Robin (natalie zea) and their sons, Jared (Liam Carroll) and Delilah (Ashley Gerasimovich)… even if you run the risk of dying of other people’s embarrassment.
There is nothing like a good family trip
Even if you don’t remember having gone by car with your parents, or at least don’t remember what it meant to travel with you as a minor, surely movies like ‘The crazy vacation of an American family’ and ‘Vacation’ or a few chapters come to mind of series like ‘The Simpsons’, in which the family has no choice but to endure several hours in a small space. Sometimes it can be nice, but other times it’s like sitting in a room full of explosives and gasoline with a match held in both palms.: an oversight and everything explodes.
It’s those experiences that led comedians and screenwriters Jason Jones and Samantha Bee to propose a television series to the American pay channel TBS. The series began its journey in 2016, until its cancellation in 2019, after four seasons and with its protagonists quite far, physically and emotionally, from its first season.
The secret: one joke, then the next… and yes, love
But you are not here, or at least not specifically, for me to tell you the origin of this comedy, but to know why you should be watching its 20-minute episodes by the time you finish reading me. And the answer is that has a unique mix of verbal and physical humor, with an enviable timing in the brightest moments, and the adult viewer as the target.
Think of those series “for adults”, live action or animation, that they try to do that alchemy and they only get a series, sometimes very irritating, of fart jokes, zaps and impossible blows. I do not want to point them out for not making blood, but they have been on the air for so many seasons that it is impossible not to bring up at least a couple.
If the humor reaches you, in the end, it is because behind all the jokes there is a sincere concern for this family. They have no intention of hurting each other and when the going gets tough, they gang up on each other: it’s just that he doesn’t give them for more. Her observations about parenting come from real feelings (remember: the germ of the series is the writers’ car trips with their children), although they are always seasoned with unexpected, coarse, scathing or absurd jokes.
What best defines their relationship, their problems and their attitude is in the pilot episode, when Jared tries to start the family car while his family pushes behind. In the end, he realizes that instead of the accelerator, he has been hitting the brakes: when his family protests, Jared defends himself by saying “I do my best” and his mother replies “That’s the problem, honey”.
Forces of nature in continuous collision
And although the entire cast (and the team behind it, mind you) contributes to the fact that each chapter has different gags in form, background and execution, to the fact that in four seasons a running gag is not just a brand image or an easy resource, but what it should be, that is, something planted with care and with new nuances in each appearance, Jason Jones himself and his wife in fiction, Natalie Zea, shine greatly.
Jason Jones is equally capable of seeming like a man smack dab in the middle of a crossroads within his company, as well as a hopeless idiot; an overly optimistic father, but also a man overcome by parental responsibility and the problems arising from his actions; someone who can’t stand up to a trucker and who can take down a mountain for his family at the same time. He also has an enviable physical formwhich leads him to endure almost every chapter quite a few humiliations and some physical gag, more than one that looks like it hurts a lot.
Opposite, Natalie Zea looks like the serious clown of the show, that is, the anchor of reality and the one on which, to make it funnier, the incredible stupidities that her husband, her son and her daughter are capable of bouncing… until little by little it gains comic entity thanks to a wild past (which he misses) cushioned by the family burden and his involvement in a plot that grows and grows with each season.
Tell me the same, but different
This old script guru adage Blake Snyder perfectly defines ‘Deviant’. You have a disastrous family that loves each other despite hurting each other, between the dysfunctionality of ‘The Simpsons’ and the affection of ‘Bob’s Burgers’. You have a first season that looks with admiration at that ‘The vacations of a wacky American family’, although it has a more current humor, close to, for example, ‘Salidos de Cuentas’ (‘Due Date’). And how do they give us the same, but differently?
Very simple: with a lot of narrative tricks. You have unreliable narrators in the first two seasons, with Nate and Robin recounting their adventures (and differing points of view); flashbacks, narrative foreshadowing that takes several seasons to make sense, scene cuts abruptly, big situations that end in nothing, and small acts that become absurdly relevant.
Listen: almost everyone wants to start a family, but no one imagines the work involved in keeping it afloat, the resignations you accept and those that come to you, or that hypocritical but obligatory feeling of prohibiting or criticizing what you did in your day . ‘Desviados’ distills all these sensations in four seasons seasoned with jokes of all kinds, concern for its protagonists and a lot of knowledge on the subject.
He has a unique blend of verbal and physical humor, with an enviable timing in the brightest moments.
There is a family that you can’t choose and others that you can, and perhaps the Parkers deserve to be allowed to appear on your screen.
‘Desviados’ can be seen on Movistar until the year 2023. Then, you can imagine how this of the streaming: either it appears somewhere else, or it disappears forever.