Modern Dads Review – Good Attempt, but Lacks Heart and Truth

It’s fairly safe to say that many in the stay-at-home dad community have been highly anticipating the promise of A&E’s Modern Dads ever since its announcement, especially after the debacle that was NBC’s 2012-2013 stereotypical and critically reviled sitcom Dads with Kids. I know a number of fellow members of the NYC Dads Group have been looking forward to it, hoping it would shine a light on the rewarding and taxing jobs we all share. And while Modern Dads definitely has its cute and funny moments, I don’t feel it does real justice to the stay-at-home dad.

Modern Dads follows the adventures (and I say “adventures” rather than “lives” because I felt I was watching a canned reality show rather than a documentary about life) of four Austin-based stay-at-home fathers, their often macho and/or sex-based banter, the relationships with their wives, girlfriends, etc., and last but not least, their time with their kids. Each dad has a “role” is this quartet, which is one of the big problems I had with the premiere episode; in real life, stay-at-home dads do not have group-assigned roles. It doesn’t help that they’re all comedians, throwing out a joke here and goofy confessional line there.

There’s Stone, the “Single Dad” (yes, it actually shows these designations over and over) who spends most of the episode flirting with women and deciding whether to get a vasectomy to avoid having another child while continuing his horny Sam Malone with a kid role (good message there), and while Stone does say at one point that his proudest achievement is his kid, it sure doesn’t come off that way as he talks about his sexual exploits with the group while the married/dating others offer up sad, tongue-lolling looks (one even says that Stone’s “living the dream”).

Next is Nate, the “New Dad,” who despite saying so, doesn’t seem to be having all that much trouble being a new dad. He’s married to a hard-working medical director. We don’t see much of Nate is the first episode, maybe because he’s so bland.

Rick is the “Veteran Dad.” He’s the father of 4 kids including adorable (I think – we barely see them) 1-year-old twin girls. He’s married to a Dell executive. Most of the episode revolves around Rick and the guys planning a birthday party for the twins. Rick wants it to be Godzilla-themed (this is believable as I know plenty of dads who want their little girls to also experience things they themselves find cool), but eventually the group decides on princesses; I could almost feel the producers nudging the dads in this direction so we could see a group of men planning a girly princess party.

Finally there’s Sean, dating a venture capitalist while being “The Step-Father” to her two kids. Sean’s the goof of the bunch. He wants to be manly, at one point trying to show his prowess with power tools only to have his girlfriend take over so it could done correctly (okay, I get this because I’m not handy at all while my wife is, but still, it felt forced in my opinion).

The guys meet up at the park, at the grocery store, and call and text each other. The kids almost always seem an afterthought to the dads’ jokes about genitals. There was zero serious conversation and zero shared parenting advice.

One of the problems I found was that the dads were already a group. I would have much rather seen a collection of fathers meeting for the first time, sort of like the original season of The Real World. This way they’d get to learn about each other and their parenting skills (or lack thereof) from the ground up. Perhaps they’d show that some of the dads have PROBLEMS and FEAR and LONELINESS. Maybe one doesn’t know what he’s doing as I didn’t when I first joined the NYC Dads Group. I’ve spent so much time having weighty conversations with those dads with whom I’ve most connected, talking about how scared I was, how I didn’t know how to feed my daughter, gathering advice and feeling the steady hands of the vets. And while the show attempts to puncture the Mr. Mom  stigma of the stay-at-home dad, it does so by not really addressing it.

Another major problem I had with the show was that all the dads involved seemed to be affluent (they were able to rent seemingly expensive costumes for the princess party) or at least comfortable enough to make the easy decision to stay home with their kids. Think about it. The three dads in relationships are with a medical director, an executive at Dell, and a venture capitalist. Stone, “The Single Dad,” is a successful freelance graphic designer and since he’s divorced, has plenty of time to stay home with his 5-year-old when he’s not hitting on young women. Modern Dads could have easily included a father who has to make the choice to stay home because the family cannot afford childcare, but they didn’t. Compared to most of the stay-at-home dads I know, these fathers have it easy.

Sure there were some laughs, but that’s not what I signed up for; I wanted truth and heart. By having these dads all already know each other and come from wealth or serious comfort money-wise, Modern Dads felt like a set-up, and odds are many stay-at-home dads won’t see themselves on screen. Compared to what’s out there and what’s been tried before, it’s a start, but overall, I felt A&E missed a significant opportunity.