Today’s advertiser is Celluma. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $1.50.

Fatherhood is not easy. In large part, this is because of children, who are generally understood to be terrible creatures, filthy and rebellious. They have few useful skills, need constant attention to prevent them from inadvertently injuring or killing themselves, and have little interest in grown-up topics like which part of your body hurts today and why. This unpleasant immaturity continues not only for years but for decades. How is a man supposed to relate to these small people?

Maybe once upon a time, it was easier. A dad worked, earned money, and left the task of raising children to his wife; he perhaps took a moment here and there to terrorize the kids with drunken violence and ill-considered vacations — the social expectations of his day. Whether these parenting techniques worked, or how you’d even measure success, was immaterial.

But in my era, the social expectations are different. For at least the last 20 years, American fathers are supposed to be involved. We are partners with our partners (be they female or male) and must make an effort at child-rearing, even if the split is never quite 50-50. We are supposed to care — which is exhausting just to think about. In my 17-plus years as a dad, I have changed diapers, given baths, read and invented bedtime stories, folded laundry, cooked innumerable dinners, helped with homework, and organized vacations both enjoyable and ill-considered. I have been present as much as is possible for a guy who used to be a travel writer and now spends most of his time somewhere deep in his own head. I have tried, and I’ve succeeded and I’ve failed, and I’m happy and grateful that this is the type of father I’ve been allowed and encouraged by society to be.

These are the end times, however, and for almost as long as I’ve been a parent, I’ve been anticipating what happens after. You know, when the ICBMs launch or the mega-caldera explodes or the seas rise or the fascists rise or the dead themselves rise. At least one of those is going to happen, right? And when it does, here I will be, a mostly competent father responsible for two daughters in a world gone to shit. Will I remain mostly competent in the face of food shortages and inexplicable violence? Or will I lose them, and my own fatherly identity, to the apocalypse?

In search of wisdom, I turned to my favorite oracle: the television. And after a non-comprehensive survey of a couple of decades of shows — from The Walking Dead to a pair of mid-2010s series no one watched, to Paradise, which just began its second season on Hulu — I think I have an idea of what fatherhood will be like after the end of the world. It will be really, really fucking hard.

More after the ad…

It takes a special kind of masochism to rewatch an entire series that was canceled after three seasons, leaving all of its story arcs unresolved, its heroes unfinished, its central mysteries unanswered. So I guess that makes me a special kind of masochist. But that’s what I did recently with Colony, which ran on USA Networks from 2016 to 2018 and is now on Amazon Prime.

From Lost co-creator Carlton Cuse and showrunner Ryan J. Condal, Colony stars Josh Holloway — yup, Sawyer from Lost! — as Will Bowman, who with his wife Katie (Sarah Wayne Callies, a.k.a. Lori from The Walking Dead) is trying to raise his three children in Los Angeles amid an alien invasion. This invasion has a twist, of course. On a day known as The Arrival, approximately a year before the pilot episode takes place, the aliens dropped huge walls around major cities across the planet, sealing off residents and installing a new collaborationist human government to run these “colonies.” (L.A. is headed by the wonderfully slippery Peter Jacobson, who you may remember from House.) Unfortunately for the Bowmans, their middle child, 12-year-old Charlie, was at some sporting event in Santa Monica that day, and has been unreachable since. So they’re behind in parenting points from the get-go.

What follows is not a “find the aliens’ secret weakness” narrative. The aliens, in fact, are rarely seen, their motivations mostly inscrutable. They have swarms of killer drones that turn miscreants to red splotches on the L.A. concrete, and they seem to be collecting humans to work in a factory on the Moon. Even the humans in positions of power have little access to their overseers.

Instead, Colony is all about the interplay between insurgency and collaboration. Desperate to find Charlie in Santa Monica, Will agrees to become a cop for the hated Occupation because they’ve offered to locate the kid — if Will helps take down the armed Resistance groups that have been bothering the government. Meanwhile, Katie, unbeknownst to her husband, has joined that very Resistance! That secret doesn’t survive the first season, but it makes things beautifully messy, as Katie takes stray details her husband mentions and uses them to foil his work — except that he’s really good at being a cop, so he foils their foilings. Mistrust multiplies on all sides: The Resistance worries Katie’s a double agent; the police department doubts Will’s loyalties. (The delightful cast, which mixes unknowns with recognizable character actors — Carl Weathers! Adrian Pasdar! Laura Innes! — makes this delicious.) This goes on for the entire series, as the Bowmans escape L.A. for the Sierras, where they are taken in by a rebel camp run by a former conspiracy theorist, then migrate to Seattle, an apparent utopia whose leader is a charming, guitar-playing tech bro with ulterior motives.

All they want is a bit of stability for their family… and, of course, to defeat the aliens, known variously as Raps, Clicks, and Morks (ha!), and their venal human enablers. But in the apocalypse, stability is worse than elusive — it’s a trap. To survive, you have to buy into the worldview of the people in power, whether they’re kooky ET-killers or status-obsessed bureaucrats from Davos. The Bowmans are constantly questioning their own motives and their own sense of reality. Is the governor of L.A. trying to help them or to use them? Are the aliens bad, or is there something worse out there? Is there any way to make things better for their kids — now and in the future — without betraying their own ideals?

As it turns out, nope! Their kids are all kinds of messed up. In L.A., a regime-connected religious zealot begins tutoring the youngest Bowman, a bland little blonde named Gracie, who later witnesses the tutor assassinated by a rival resistance group. Charlie is rescued by his dad from Santa Monica, but clearly traumatized by his experience there under the thumb of a beachside Fagin — he’s hoarding food, hiding under the bed with a knife, and listening for the soft pad of evil footsteps outside the door. The oldest son, Bram, is an older teen frustrated with the apparent complacency of his parents; he helps blow up a space-supply ship, joins the rival rebels, and murders an ambassador — then lies about it all, pretending through tears to be a conflicted teen rather than a stone-cold psychopath.

And it gets worse from there, because Mom and Dad are so obsessed with their work — not just their jobs but their all-consuming anti-authoritarian activities — that they neglect basic parental duties: meals, attempts at schooling, just being around and available for the kids who need them. And so Charlie dies a meaningless death during a raid on the Sierra camp, and Bram, sick of his parents’ irresponsibility, moves out of the family’s new Seattle home, taking hollow-eyed, mistrustful Gracie with him to the house of his girlfriend, whose own dad is a snitchy police sergeant. The series ends on a miserable note, with Will turning himself over to the aliens, having given up on parenthood entirely, and Katie trapped outside Seattle, not even knowing where her family is.

The Bowmans have failed as parents. And they’ve failed for the reasons that parents always fail in these apocalyptic shows: They’re just trying to protect their kids in an exceedingly dangerous world, where threats are everywhere — but because those threats are everywhere, the parents use up all their time and energy fighting, with none left over for the less exciting but ultimately more important task of communicating openly and honestly with their kids. (My own kids agree: If there’s a fascist takeover, they said, my wife and I are not to join the Resistance. Because who’s going to make dinner?) And so the kids go bad, wander off, rebel, and the parents don’t notice until it’s too late. Workaholics, amirite?

I feel like this happened all the time on The Walking Dead, where moms and dads kept losing their kids to zombies (and humans), and reacted by becoming incomparable killing machines themselves. And still they kept losing their kids, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. It’s the apocalypse, after all. Shrinkage is expected.

In a way, this has to happen, because if it doesn’t — if the kids remain safe and the families intact — then the show feels unrealistic. That’s what happens on Falling Skies, which ran from 2011 to 2015 and is getting promoted on Netflix these days because it stars The Pitt’s Noah Wyle as a Boston University history professor (and single father of three boys) who winds up leading the resistance to an alien invasion. Although one of the kids gets kidnapped by the aliens and partially mutated into one, nothing truly bad happens to any of them, including the sickeningly adorable youngest one. They all survive, Dad finds a new woman to replace the wife who died before the series starts, and they defeat the aliens in one shot by killing the alien queen. You will not be surprised to learn that Steven Spielberg was one of the executive producers.

Even there, though, the apocalyptic parenting arc remains the same: Whoever Dad was before the end of the world — i.e., a dorky academic who brings up Ancient Rome and the American Revolution at every opportunity — cannot survive. Instead, he must become a soldier, a warrior, a military leader, a man who both directly and indirectly wields violence to protect his family and the human race. Whatever other fatherly qualities he might once have possessed, and might still despite everything retain, pale in comparison to this capacity for fighting. The future of fatherhood looks a lot like the distant past.

Right now, I’m wondering how Paradise will turn out, parenting-wise. This Hulu show, which stars Sterling K. Brown (who is awesome) as Secret Service agent Xavier Collins, takes place in a pleasant small town that happens to exist under a mountain in Colorado, where the U.S. president and an elite group of 25,000 have fled a climate apocalypse and also possibly a nuclear one. Conspiracies abound, and as Xavier — whose wife was left behind in Atlanta and is presumably dead — tracks them down, he pretty much neglects his son and his daughter. They’re organized, competent kids, and the city is safe, but… really, the dude is not present. The son, for example, has been working up the courage to ride a Ferris wheel, and Xavier has promised to be there for him when he does, but instead he wanders off to do some conspiracizing, leaving the kid to ride it alone. The show underplays the moment — the kid seems happy — so maybe that’s the point? That Xavier didn’t need to stick around? Even so, it’s odd to see this modern dad show not a bit of guilt. He doesn’t even realize his failing!

Maybe that’s because his mind is elsewhere. Late in the first season, he learns that his wife may have survived the apocalypse, so after solving that season’s conspiracy, he leaves Bunkertown — and his children! — to seek her out, which is now the plot of season two. Who does that? I mean, I love my wife, but the romantic gesture is not the realistic one: For the kids’ sake, it’s infinitely better I stay underground with them. Besides, my wife is pretty tough. I’m sure she’ll be okay on the surface. That’s how you survive the apocalypse — by not taking the kinds of chances that make for great television.

In one scene, early in season two, Xavier learns how just little the apocalypse cares for his parenting skills. Having landed in Arkansas, he finds himself being cared for by a group of weird, nearly silent children hiding in a beached boat. From his bag, he pulls out his beloved copy of James and the Giant Peach and says, “I could read to you. Would you like that?” In response, one of the kids asks if he can have Xavier’s jacket “when you’re dead.” There’s not much Xavier can do but answer, “Okay. Maybe no book.”

I am fairly certain that the apocalypse, if and when it comes, will not resemble what I’ve seen onscreen. I won’t need to become a super-soldier, won’t need to play rebels and collaborators against one another, won’t need to sacrifice my high-minded parenting ideals in favor of reflexive ultra-violence. But if there is a lesson in these shows for us pre-apocalyptic dads (and moms), I think it’s this: There may be little we can do to protect our kids from the world. Bombs will fall, zombies will bite, the oceans will rise and engulf us all, the fascists will seize power. So very, very much is out of our control. But what is in our control is how we relate to our kids, how we explain to them a world of madness, and how we at once project an image of strength and reliability even as we allow them to see that we may fail, will probably fail, and give them the wisdom and skills to survive our failures¹. After that, the future seasons are up to them. 🪨🪨🪨