Almost every couple I know has their TV shows—the ones they commit to watching together, a regularly scheduled date. A good TV show is an easily shared respite, and of course, amid the busy lives of parents, those aren’t always easy to come by. Which brings me to “Togetherness,” which just ended its first season on HBO. In the same way that women in their 20s might feel a special sense of connection to “Girls” or “Broad City,” I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of parent couples out there feel like “Togetherness” is a show about their lives—not in the actual story lines necessarily but at least in the coloration: The big themes, issues, emotions, serendipities, and tensions. On Sunday night’s season finale, my wife and I even found ourselves yelling back at the screen!
Remember the Borg from “Star Trek”? If you’re not familiar, the Borg was a technologically advanced amoral collective that basically consumed and assimilated other cultures into its own—or it just destroyed them. Its memorable slogan was: “Resistance is futile.” At the risk of sounding more negative than I feel, to me, the act of being parent is a bit Borg-like in how it can consume a marriage. It’s necessary and inevitable that responsible parents are going to focus much of their time and energy on their children. How you feel about that, of course, becomes a part of how you feel about your partner. This is not news, but still the reality of it tends to overtake people with some level of surprise that it has happened to them too.
So with a soft SPOILER ALERT (meaning that I won’t quite ruin it), my wife and I were watching the last minutes of “Togetherness,” with one of the central questions being whether the show’s leading wife (Michelle, played by Melanie Lynskey) will commence a physical relationship with one of her co-workers. The show teases it out so well that my wife and I start a running side commentary to each other: “This isn’t going to end well.” “This can’t be good.” “Someone stop her.” And then, finally: “DON’T DO IT!”
I’m not going to say whether she listened to us or not. But either way, I guess we related, as I feel most marrieds, even the happy and committed ones, would.
With the season over, any suggestions?
Eric Messinger is the editor of New York Family. He can be reached at emessinger@manhattanmedia.com.
