Dads Being Dads

Dads Being Dads is a two-host conversation built on the small stuff of family life, told by Randy and Jason with no attempt to hide the seams. It is scrappy, and it knows it. One episode opens with a joke that the show notes are more broken than the show itself, then abandons its own welcome and starts again. Another comes back from technical difficulties with a host uneasy about retelling a story he has already told once. Episodes open on a stray line of banter before the welcome, and the introductions are a bit of their own: a school board candidate, a driving instructor who admits he is not an official one, a show renamed for dads who are still alive. The household material is specific. One host announces that he now has a fifteen-year-old, with two more birthdays in the house since the last recording. Talk of teenagers who are frankly scared to get behind the wheel leads into a carpool of three kids to club soccer in Framingham, where every road seems to be two or three lanes and a pickup truck pulls out slowly on Route 9. A Valentine's Day dinner out gets dismissed as expensive and overpriced. A gift card for running a ski club sets off a small rant about gift cards telling people where to go. A memory of announcing a Disney World trip to young kids who only worried about missing school ends with a joke about selling them on it by repeating the TV ads. The neighborhood gets its turn. A walk to a dance with a daughter becomes a grim scene of one skunk attacking another while a neighbor hoses them down to no effect. A car window broken overnight, possibly by a BB gun, leads to talk about wanting to trust the people around you, and Randy gets told his privilege is showing. Local politics runs through this stretch, since Jason ran for school committee. The pair compare a New England town meeting to Parks and Rec and describe a habit of inventing their own tidy fixes for the politicking, such as giving everyone the same financing. Their bodies take a beating as well: an adult soccer game one host regrets, and a rib injury on a company ski trip where the running joke was about who would get hurt. Headlines get read aloud and puzzled over, including a Gwyneth Paltrow trial over a 2016 ski collision. At least one cold open goes for crude humor. Every sampled episode closes with the same sign-off, asking for emails, Facebook likes and iTunes stars, with Twitter mentioned and then put off with 'we'll have to get back on that.' What comes through is the feel of a standing hangout: whatever happened since the last recording, told by two people who still find it funny.