(S01E05) It's really getting hard to watch 'Parenthood,' and not in a "Gee, this show is so painfully real that it makes me question the true nature of love and family devotion" kind of way.

It's quite the opposite.

The seams are really starting to show as the episodes try to stretch across an entire season. It now feels so unbelievable because of the lackluster characters and dialogue that I'm starting to feel just as bored as the people look on the screen.

This week's episode was filled with moments that just had me shaking my head at how unrealistic the scenes felt. It's also gotten so run-of-the-mill and ordinary and has lost any cohesiveness with its running story lines. It's hard to like a show that keeps giving me one less reason to look forward to tuning in every week.

To be fair, it's the little things that have me wondering if the show has lost all contact with the outside world, but they quickly add up, so even a blind man spot them from a mile away. For instance, the way that the adults act around Max's syndrome just doesn't really show any imagination or ingenuity. The coach talks to Max as if he's a mute and just about every parent that comes into contact with Adam and Kristina feel as though they are walking through a room filled with hinged mouse traps. A little uncomfortable humor from one big mouth parent would feel like a step up at this point.

Adam's plot line had the promise of being something funny and interesting, but that simply descends into the "Daddy hates his little girl's boyfriend" routine that we've seen a million times before, and in much funnier and more interesting situations.

This leads to a fight that comes out nowhere between Haddie and her parent ass-kissing crush over what he thought of 'Love, Actually,' but the possibility of a breakup that somehow magically resolves itself when the boyfriend admits he was just trashing the movie because he was hiding his sensitive side. It felt tacked on and totally unbelievable in terms of plot and dialogue. The boyfriend's fight speech actually included the quip, "'Love, Actually?' More like 'Lame, Actually.'" Did the writers go to the Gene Shalit School of Movie Criticism?

The Crosby-Jabbar angle continues to be the most interesting plot line of the show, but it took a weird turn with Crosby asking for DNA test angle at the behest of the ever-nosey Julia. Why would the boy's mother act so standoffish and cold to the idea? Sure she hasn't asked for money or any financial responsibilities, but wouldn't it be better to be sure?

The whole line leads to the typical "everything's alright" ending where the mother concedes that Crosby has the right to be sure and Crosby refuses because he knows in his heart Jabbar is his. I had to check the info box on my TiVo to make sure it hadn't accidentally taped something off Lifetime.

Speaking of Julia, she is without a doubt my least favorite lead character in this cast of cruddiness. She's always trying to fix things and fails miserably, only to have everything work out alright in the end with or without her help, whether it's teaching her daughter how to swim in the deep end or getting her to muster the courage to play the Princess with her stuck-up friend. Even the Buddhist mother feels like a cold, two-dimensional stereotype set up solely to create migraines for Julie, and both end up just as unlikeable.

The only promising part is Sarah falling for her daughter's English teacher. The setup, in which the daughter steals one of her mother's old term papers to score an easy grade on a hard book report, felt a little fresh, even if you could tell the inevitable love-fest was coming, but it didn't have much of a reason to exist outside of the upcoming romantic angle. It still kept my attention, which was more than I could say for the rest of the episode.

Even the good characters like Crosby, played by Dax Shepard, and Adam, played by Peter Krause, came off as very dry and held back in this episode. Maybe it's because they are trying to tone up the dramatic element or the script just doesn't give them much to work with, but their performances felt just rote and flat.

'Parenthood?' More like 'Parentshould-Not-Watch-This-Episode.'

Other observations:
- Enough with the happy endings! Can't just one episode end on a really sour note for someone? Couldn't Max have dropped that fly ball? Would that have been so horrible? I'll take any bad downer ending at this point: a mugging, a near drowning, a nuclear warhead theft. Anything that might get someone interesting in tuning in to next week's episode, namely me.

- I know this is such a geek thing to complain about, but it was so obvious the boyfriend was not playing the video game with Max in that early scene. How does a teenager, a human being put on earth solely to line the pockets of the Nintendo corporation, not know how to fake play a video game? Could it be that today's youngin's are putting down their controllers and picking up (gasp!) books?