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beverly-bad-mom.jpeg

Maybe Beverly from 'The Goldbergs' Is Just a Terrible Mother

By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 6, 2022 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | October 6, 2022 |


beverly-bad-mom.jpeg

I’m not sure how I have become the Internet’s official nitpicker of The Goldbergs, but here I am, back for the third week in a row to complain about a storyline on a family sitcom in its 10th season that otherwise isn’t discussed anywhere else for any reason other than the departure of Jeff Garlin.

I feel like The Goldbergs is unraveling, and I want to document it. Here it is! A weekly glance at an American family sitcom that has overstayed its welcome! Honestly, it’s only interesting for the fact that The Goldbergs is not an extraordinary sitcom. During the first six seasons of the series, which were often very good, it was — at its best — a sweet, heartwarming series about a fairly typical suburban Jewish family in the 1980s. But it has never been the kind of sitcom that warrants a decade-long run.

This is not Friends or Seinfeld. It’s never had the kind of ratings that Big Bang Theory produced. It is not a particularly popular series and it has produced no major new television stars. I doubt that 60 percent of regular viewers of The Goldbergs even know that the name of the actor who plays Adam Goldberg is Sean Giambrone. Hayley Orrantia — who plays Erica, and who I genuinely like — was a contestant on the last season of The Masked Singer. Do you think that Kaley Cuoco was doing The Masked Singer in her 10th year of Big Bang Theory?

The Goldbergs premiered in 2013. That’s the year that Netflix debuted House of Cards, which ushered in the era of original streaming content. That was the year that Sleepy Hollow and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Trophy Wife, The Michael J. Fox Show, and Ground Floor debuted, and The Goldbergs has outlived them all! But why? The only other ABC shows still on the air from 2013 are Grey’s Anatomy and Dancing with the Stars. The Goldbergs lead-in (Agents of SHIELD) and lead-out (Back in the Game) are both long gone.

And yet The GoldbergsTHE GOLDBERGS — lives on. For ten years it has survived without making a single cultural dent, probably because it has nothing to do with contemporary culture. It is an episode of VH1’s I Love the ’80s wrapped around a traditional family sitcom, and lately, the whole show is basically Joey in the final season of Friends. Every character is an exaggerated caricature of themselves plus a fart joke. And the thing is, if this were the 10th season of Friends or Seinfeld, the creative cratering of the series would be getting a lot more attention. But The Goldbergs, despite being the longest-running live-action sitcom currently on network television, gets none of that. Except from me, because someone needs to do it.

That’s a long preamble to this week’s sh*tty sitcom storyline. In the season’s first episode, The Goldbergs covered the fallout from Murray’s death, namely that everyone was sad when they thought they lost Murray’s La-Z-Boy. In the season’s second episode, the series had to figure out a way to keep Adam from going to college, so he decided to take a gap year and work on a movie set.

Adam is now a PA on the set of that unnamed movie set, where he spends all day standing near an orange cone to make sure no one trips and falls into a pothole. He’s miserable, so he calls his ex-girlfriend Brea, who is attending college at Brown. Because the sitcom trope Gods insist it, Adam (at the behest of his mother) pretends that he’s having a great time in order to make Brea jealous, while Brea pretends she’s having a great time in college when she, too, is miserable.

Eventually, the two come clean when Brea decides to come back to Jenkintown to visit Adam. The two instantly reconnect, and Brea is so happy to see Adam that she decides that maybe — like Adam — she also wants to drop out of college and move back home, too.

Ironically, it’s Beverly who convinces Brea to go back to college. “I think we all know that Brea can’t stay,” she says to both Adam and Brea. “It gets better,” she tells Brea. “A lot better. In fact, [college] should be the best time of your life. You deserve that.” It’s what Brea needed to hear, and she decides that she does need to go back.

WHERE WAS THIS SPEECH WHEN ADAM DROPPED OUT OF COLLEGE, BEVERLY? When your own son decided to take a gap year and f**k around with a traffic cone on the set of a television movie, Beverly was like, “Sure, schmoopie! Stay home with me!” But when Adam’s ex-girlfriend decides maybe she wants to stay home, too? Beverly is suddenly the mother of the goddamn year, the mom that Adam needed last week. What is wrong with this woman? It is 1980-something, and Beverly has three adult-aged children and one son-in-law still living at home. This is what happens when mothers are too overprotective! Their children will never leave because they do not have the skills to cope outside the nest. The entire family is horribly co-dependent.

Beverly is a terrible mother. Maybe this is the natural consequence of a “Mama Bear” smothering her son with kisses well into adulthood. You reap what you sow, Beverly! It feels like at the end of almost every single episode, Beverly realizes that she needs to give her kids some space, but she has been learning that lesson for 10 years, and it clearly has not stuck.