ham fisted theatrics

This letter is from your real dad, not your TV dad. You probably won’t be able to read for another five years or so, but by that time, it may already be too late: you may have forgotten me entirely in favor of that shiny, well-muscled impostor you spend six hours a day on a soundstage with (six hours being the maximum time a one-year-old child actress is allowed to work at a stretch.)

For all I know, you’ve already been imprinted with the mental image of this pretty-boy actor as your father, because you spend take after take with him holding you in his arms. And I can’t blame you, you aren’t responsible for how you perceive the world at your age, all you know is light and warmth, and it’s a great deal lighter and warmer in the studio than it is in the one-bedroom walkup in West Hollywood; the rent on which your mother and I almost wouldn’t have been able to pay if we hadn’t landed this role for you as the newborn daughter of lead character David Hurpins on the hit premium-cable drama “The Raven’s Nest,” now in its triumphant fourth season.

But let me just say this: if your real father didn’t carry you back and forth across a room eighty times, it’s not because he doesn’t love you. It’s because your real father doesn’t need eighty takes to hold you: he gets it right the first time.

And your real dad may not be an idealistic lawyer defending the wrongly accused, like your TV dad. But let me tell you some other things your real dad isn’t that your TV dad is: an alcoholic (season 1), unfaithful to his wife with his beautiful prosthetic-legged assistant (season 2), involved in the cover-up of the murder of a mildly racist district attorney (season 3), or a relapsed alcoholic (season 4).

I realize that those things don’t seem so bad in the context of the show, and are framed in such a way as to make your TV dad appear not like a bad person, but rather tragically conflicted. I’m sure if there was a writing staff and a camera crew following your real dad, they would find a way to frame his journey from community college to a series of PA jobs on soap operas to the unemployment line (briefly) to an ill-considered stint in culinary school all seem very dramatic and romantic as well, but there isn’t. And your real dad’s life isn’t very dramatic or romantic, it just is, and he doesn’t love you because his love for your provides him with a reason to quit drinking or a reason to keep his dissolving marriage together or a reason to hide his family for fear of reprisals from a mob boss he helped convict. He just loves you because he does.

Unlike your TV dad, your real dad doesn’t stop being your dad once the director calls the day a rap and speed home in a Maserati to his wife, the actress who plays the sexy nurse on “Doctor’s Orders,” and have a dinner party with various snooty producers and directors who were all, at one time or another, mean to your real dad when he was a PA. Your real dad is your dad twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Your real dad doesn’t go in for hair and makeup, in fact, your real dad would kill to have hair at all. But more importantly, your real dad would kill to protect you. And not the sort of killing your TV dad did of the mob boss in the season three cliffhanger, near-accidental and with someone else’s gun. Your real dad would deliberately murder anyone who meant you harm if he had to. And you know he’d go to jail for it, too, because he doesn’t have the superhero-like legal prowess of your TV dad.

If it seems like your real dad is having trouble between the actor who plays your dad on a TV show and the character in that TV show, it’s only because he worries that if the line is blurry to him, to your tiny mind it must be this awesome package of shiny warm model-pretty brightly-lit fatherhood with which your actual father can’t even begin to compete, and that scares him. Scared being something your real dad gets sometimes, and not in a dramatic way that shades and complicates his character; just insecure and scared.

And if you might be asking, if my real dad was so worried about losing my affection to a TV dad, why did he even put me in a situation where I would have a TV dad? And the honest answer is that he and your real mother needed the money. And if you think compromising you for money is a weakness only your real dad has, I heard some guys from the writing staff say that in Season Five your TV dad is going to sell you to another family to pay off his gambling debts. So there.