A frank acknowledgement of how adults spend their time

In the otherwise unremarkable kids movie Wonder Park, which I decided was a better option than Shazam for my five-year-old and eight-year-old on Thursday night, there was a moment that made me laugh for how true it was.

The mother of the heroine, named June, is tucking her in to bed, and winding down the fantasy play they've just been involved in. June's dad comes to collect her mother, and gives the following as the playful reason she must come away:

"Come on, you've got a DVR that's near capacity and it's not going to watch itself." Or words to that effect.

It was an honest and refreshing acknowledgement of what parents actually do when they put their children to bed: They watch TV.

Movies tend to present an idealized version of their good characters. The bad characters may engage in activities that have no merit, but the heroes never do. In most movies, this dad might be scooping up this mom so they could go to their poetry reading or their cooking class.

Nope. They just have a DVR choked with unwatched episodes of peak TV, and if they don't start taming it they'll have to start deleting things unwatched.

Now that's a dilemma I can relate to.

If anything it's a little quaint. The full DVR was maybe the big dilemma of five years ago. Now, most peak TV you care to watch is available on a streaming service, where size limits are not relevant considerations.

But I just appreciate the fact that the movie isn't trying to make this mom and dad out to be Super Mom and Super Dad. After they've fulfilled their obligations to their child for the night, it's time to bunker in for a television show or three.

A little later in the narrative, June is going off to math camp as her mother is sick in the hospital. She has this waking nightmare of what will happen to her dad if she's not there to look after him. In this vision, she sees him slumped in his easy chair in perpetuity as the empty pizza boxes pile up around him and he watches TV. When he finally summons the necessary energy in his legs to go to the refrigerator, it's full of crows rather than food.

I'd say that was similar to what I did when the family was away last weekend, with one significant difference: The fridge was a place of abundance, freshly stocked with things I was ashamed to eat when the family was present, rather than a barren wasteland.

When she actually catches her dad in the act of something he shouldn't be doing, it's scooping and eating ice cream directly from the tub. He immediately hides it behind his back.

Hey, just because we do these things doesn't mean we don't feel guilty about them.