Long before "emotionally available" was a phrase people said out loud, Gomez Addams was already doing it in a gothic suit. And before any of us had language for surrogate fatherhood, Uncle Phil Banks was catching a broken kid in a Bel-Air mansion and making every person watching feel it in their chest.

On Episode 109 of Parallel Frequencies, Just Blane and Coco take on the TV dads who weren't just characters — they were the blueprints. Some of us had great dads at home. Some of us didn't. And some of us had a television set that quietly filled in the blanks.

This episode moves through Cliff Huxtable's complicated but undeniable legacy, Mike Brady as the first stepdad treated with real dignity on network TV, Red Foreman's gruff emotional unavailability as an accidental time capsule, and what Al Bundy actually represents beyond the punc ...