Once a family, always a family. Lauren Graham, Mae Whitman and more of the Parenthood cast have kept a close bond since the beloved series came to an end.
Loosely based on Ron Howard‘s 1989 movie of the same name, the NBC drama ran for six seasons from 2010 to 2015. Graham starred as wayward single mother Sarah Braverman who moves in with her parents (Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia) in Berkeley, California, amid her divorce. Her children, Amber (Whitman) and Drew (Miles Heizer), adjust to life in their grandparents’ guest house and bond with their extended family through all their ups and downs.
Dax Shepard, Peter Krause, Monica Potter, Sarah Ramos, Max Burkholder, Erika Christensen and Sam Jaeger also rounded out the Braverman brood.
“There’s such an overwhelming energy when we’re all together,” Whitman told Glamour of her fictional family in October 2014. “All of our personalities gel so well.”
While the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World star quickly connected with Heizer and Ramos, she couldn’t help but gush over her relationship with Graham.
“The first word that comes to mind is life. I don’t remember what my life was like before her,” Whitman said of the Gilmore Girls alum. “She has shaped my existence so much. She’s more than a best friend: she’s my role model, she’s a mother, she’s a sister. I mist up even talking about her.”
The California native was equally as close with Krause, Graham’s real-life love and onscreen sibling. “He’s incredibly compassionate and smart and funny,” Whitman told Glamour of her “rustic dad.”
Graham, for her part, will always look back fondly on her Parenthood journey — and even lives near Shepard in California. Longtime friendships formed on the NBC series, but even more magical was the love story that came together behind the scenes.
“We couldn’t stop talking,” the Mighty Ducks: Game Changers star told Good Housekeeping in December 2016, reminiscing on the early days of her romance with Krause. “Not about ourselves, but about the world and books and family. … Once we got together, there was no game play. It was like, ‘You like me, and I like you.’”
In her 2016 book, Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between), Graham admitted that she didn’t expect to fall for her costar. “At our age we’d probably both been through ‘showmances’ that went south and made work an uncomfortable place to be,” she wrote. “Ultimately our mutual wariness gave way — it just sort of happened.”
Us Weekly confirmed in June 2022, however, that the couple quietly called it quits one year prior.
Fans have been eager to see the Braverman family grace their TV screens again, but creator Jason Katims could still use some convincing when it comes to a revival.
“It would start at the moment when I feel like I have a story to tell,” he told TV Line in August 2016. “But the whole thing about Parenthood is the kids get a little older and their lives change and then there’s more story to tell. I feel like that will happen at some point. And then it will be a question of, logistically, can we get the actors [back together] at the same time?”
Scroll down to see all of the Parenthood cast’s sweetest reunions through the years: