Dad TV Is for Everyone Now

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Apple

The old-school vision of Dad TV is literal and concrete — TV viewed by actual dads, typically featuring male protagonists, who go about their lives in problem-solving mode. Sometimes this means they solve crimes in an hourly fashion. This is the Procedural Dad TV model, the world of NCIS and JAG and Blue Bloods and SWAT, but not Law & Order because it’s too much about moral ambiguity and the endings can be left open-ended (and we all know SVU is for the ladies). Sometimes the problem solving is on a broader, more abstract scale, as with a show like The West Wing, where fixing a problem is about romantic visions of national identity and the best tool for the job is a persuasive bit of rhetoric, not investigative skills or a carefully constructed timeline. Sometimes the problem solving happens in other genres. Star Trek: The Next Generation, for instance, is a show about a loving and stern Space Dad who encounters a problem over and over and helps his space family solve it. Sometimes they solve it without him, or for him, but this too is the essence of dad. What could be more fatherly than the pride one feels when one’s kids get the job done?

This traditionalist vision of the Dad TV show is rooted in the concept of a specific viewer (an actual dad) and revolves around a core set of values to which that viewership adheres. Dad TV is about competence, process, optimization, a fundamental trust in or desire for functional social institutions, and the bone-deep belief that good drama comes from taking something broken and fixing it. But a strict textualist interpretation of the Dad TV constitution feels inadequate in 2024: It’s no longer just the purview of dads or even of men. According to Nielsen streaming data, the extremely Dadcore show Bad Monkey actually has an even split of male and female viewers, and the Sad Feelings Dad show Shrinking has slightly more female viewers than male. TikTok, not an app particularly known for its heavily dad user base, is home to an intense Criminal Minds fandom. As Dad TV has proliferated across platforms, the audience has ballooned and so the genre has followed, expanding into a supersized Dad+ TV of the streaming era.

This makes the definition of Dad TV a little more complex these days. The core ideas are here: Dad+ TV viewers still long for competence. They want characters doing the best possible version of their tasks, preferably via nitty-gritty depictions of a well-designed process lovingly planned and enacted. And so the dads at the center of these shows (whether literal or symbolic) believe in big institutions that provide order and a system that keeps everyone functional. Think of shows like Reacher, The Night Agent, Jack Ryan, Tokyo Vice, FUBAR, and The Terminal List, where at some level there is “the government,” or “justice,” or “the way things should be,” a broader framework of status quo these series’ protagonists seek to support or restore. Of course, their commitment to the idea of social order tends to leave a notable loophole regarding their own actions. In the pursuit of competence and order and fixing broken things, sometimes somebody’s gotta break the rules so they can put the rules back together the right way. And that somebody? It’s gonna be a dad — or rather a person of any age, gender, or parental status who is so naturally trusting of the Establishment that when they have misgivings, well, that must mean something.

Because in Dad+ TV, femininity is no longer a barrier to being Dad. Consider Julia, the Max series about Julia Child’s transformation from housewife into international culinary megastar. Superficially, nothing could look less like Reacher (aside from the coincidence of Julia Child and Jack Reacher both having notably capable, broad hands). One’s a show about a guy using those hands to punch people in the face; the other’s a show about a middle-aged woman massaging butter into a chicken. Julia’s impetus, though, is a woman who sees a need in the world. She believes in her unique ability to fulfill that need, and she rallies her circle of friends, family, and colleagues to institute widespread change based on her own remarkable and unflagging competence. Julia is a paean to the deep-down certainty that hard work and goodness will win the day and that the process of practicing and perfecting something is the route to the best possible result but also an experience that’s worthy just for the process of it. And, if anything, her position as a woman forced to battle against 1950s sexism only provides another anchor for her Dad TV cred: She believes in the possibility of the social system, but the current version of it is flawed. You know who can fix it if she bends the rules a little? Julia, Neo-Dad.

There’s Dad TV in some form or another on every streaming outlet, but the locus of contemporary streaming dadness is Apple TV+. In Dad+ TV, the stories unfold over the kind of long-season arc that tends to define a streaming season, rather than the rhythms of procedural, episodic problem solving. But the goals remain the same. The easiest show to point to is Ted Lasso, a towering monument to the importance of doing your best at work and in life with its ambitions stretched over the slower-burn development of multiple years of personal growth, rather than a game-by-game chart of wins and losses.

From its launch, Apple has had a deep bench of programming that fulfills the tenets of this genre in both its traditionalist and more contemporary versions. There are classic dude-protagonist shows that overlap with the general dad preoccupations, including See, Manhunt, and Masters of the Air. Hijack is the pinnacle of Apple’s accomplishments in this zone — a dad, doing his best, is the only person capable of foiling an elaborate plane-hijacking plot, which he has to do through ingenuity, courage, and a combination of emotional intelligence and physical prowess. He is played by Idris Elba in prime fatherly form, reassuring his family over the phone even as he’s coordinating the passengers to work alongside the one insightful ground-control staff member and take down the baddies. He’s Dad Extraordinaire, firm and encouraging and unshakably certain he can get everyone home safe.

Neo-Dad is where Apple really shines, though. It began with For All Mankind, one of the platform’s earliest original shows, which starts from pristine Dadcore obsession with all things space-race related, then twists it through the distinctly girl-dad wife-guy prism of an alternate American history where women shape the most important developments in technology and ingenuity. Apple has Lessons in Chemistry, its own version of Julia with even more of a Women in STEM valence. What could be more Neo-Dad than the proud celebration of gender parity in the sciences? Apple has Slow Horses, which asks the daring question of what happens when the competent, heroic spies are also total messes who can barely tie their own shoes. Neo-Dad thrives by questioning old-school, default assumptions about masculinity and strength. There’s Sugar (caring, driven noir detective is an alien, staring soulfully at humanity and longing to assimilate), and Presumed Innocent (Dad’s a flawed guy, but he loves his family and he loves the truth), and Foundation (humanity can be saved if only we set up Dad’s very important archive), and Shrinking (Dad’s a mess, but he loves feelings and he’s doing the best he can), and Black Bird (Dad’s a broken mess, but maybe he can redeem himself by bringing down a bad guy … except he’s also the bad guy). The height of this mode on Apple TV+ is Silo, a sci-fi adaptation where the whole system is both mysterious and corrupt, but the intrepid, highly skilled, and unflappable protagonist played by Rebecca Ferguson is undaunted in her need to figure out what’s really going on.

The dark foil to all of this is Aggrieved Dad TV, the paternal model offered by Yellowstone and other Taylor Sheridan shows that depict men standing atop an empire they’ve fought to build, grappling with the knowledge that the future looks worse than the past. These shows stem from ideological progenitor shows like Last Man Standing, a comedy about a man whose family just can’t (or won’t) live up to his political and cultural expectations. These are dads who’ve lost faith in the world, who no longer trust that the next generation can be as happy and successful as the last. Competence and process are still key, but these protagonists feel betrayed by their children and by the world they’ve inherited; they are battling a system that’s trying to take down everything they’ve built. There’s an exhaustion and a nihilism to these series, which include at least two shows helmed by Jeff Daniels (American Rust and A Man in Full), Curb Your Enthusiasm, and maybe most notably in the earlier prestige years Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. The Aggrieved Dads of 20 years ago, though, lived within fictional frames that regularly questioned their protagonists. Breaking Bad is a portrait of one man’s rage and dark ambition, but it is always questioning whether those qualities should be celebrated or condemned. Yellowstone is light on questions. Yellowstone offers Kevin Costner in profile, staring at the mountain ranges and wondering where it all went wrong.

The popularity of the Aggrieved Dad, especially given its recent rise in the Taylor Sheridan universe, is its own argument for why the sunnier version of Dad TV still has the hold it does. They are two different visions that come from the same deep fears and fantasies about the world. Dad TV, the sunnier version, is a fundamentally optimistic vision of humanity and what really matters, a meritocratic system where one guy’s need to occasionally flout the rules magically exists in perfect harmony with the larger belief in a social order that works for everyone. It is, in the end, a pervasive promise that everything will be okay. It may be foolhardy, it’s usually a little blinkered about the world, and it’s as reliable as that thing your dad does where he comes over for dinner but shows up with a new filter for your furnace and now is installing it while asking you if you’ve changed the battery in your car’s key-fob lately. (Have you? It’s important.)