Last season on NBC’s “Parenthood,” Kristina Braverman (Monica Potter) is making pancakes, nervously anticipating her looming chemotherapy for breast cancer.
Her mother-in-law, Camille (Bonnie Bedelia), stops by to check in on her and bring her a gift: a cozy black and red shirt.
“Remember I had told you about my friend who had just gone through chemo? She gave me this to give to you,” Camille tells Kristina, whose eyes are filling with tears. “So, it’s been passed from person to person. And you’ll be the seventh person to wear this during chemo.”
The scene is one of showrunner Jason Katims’ favorites in the show, which began its fifth season last month.
The breast cancer storyline was inspired by his wife, Kathy, 50. And that sweater was the actual one Kathy wore during her chemotherapy treatments.
“When my wife was about to go for her first treatment, our friend Patrick Norris, also a director on ‘Parenthood,’ came over to our house and gave her that sweater. It was the sweater he wore himself through chemo and he has passed to other numerous people as well,” Jason, 52, tells The Post. “That became a favorite scene of mine on the show — I thought it was very moving and very real. It added meaning to me that the real sweater was there.”
When Jason decided to take on the difficult topic, he knew he wanted it to play out over a full season. He didn’t want it to be a quick couple of episodes because, he says, he knows first-hand that’s not how cancer affects a family.
We see Kristina’s diagnosis early in Season 4. A couple of episodes later, she breaks the news to the close-knit Braverman clan over a pizza dinner.
Later, we watch the poignant highs and lows of her year — from shaving her head when she begins to lose her hair from chemotherapy treatments to experimenting with medical marijuana.
“One of the things that gave me the courage to pursue this storyline was knowing that Monica and Peter [Krause, who plays her husband, Adam] have such good comedic skills,” Katims says. “I knew we’d be able to find moments of humor and lightness in the story that is such an emotional story and can be a difficult one to tell.”
Although not all of the details of the Bravermans’ story are based on the Katims family’s experience, the happy ending is: Kristina finds out she’s gone into remission during the Season 4 finale and the couple celebrates with sun, sand and margaritas in Hawaii.
“Early on, I was thinking of that — them going to Hawaii — as the place we wanted to get to,” Jason says. “Kathy had just gone through her final treatment and we also had a moment to go there and rest after everything that she had gone through over the last year — both emotionally and physically.”
Kathy has been in remission for three years now.
Jason says his family is now used to seeing autobiographical elements of their lives on the series. Like Adam and Kristina’s son, Max (Max Burkholder), their own 16-year-old son has been diagnosed with Asberger’s, an autism spectrum syndrome.
“With that story, we’ve seen how much it’s helped people in the autistic community in different ways,” Jason says . “It makes it worth it, even though, in some ways, you might feel you lose a little bit of privacy.”
Jason has already heard stories about fans who have gone for mammograms after seeing Kristina’s diagnosis and, as a result, have detected early-stage cancer.
This season, although Kristina is in remission, her cancer battle is still informing her storyline. In the premiere, the stay-at-home mom decides to run for mayor.
“I felt like after Kathy went through this, it’s a real wake-up call. You’re really confronted with your mortality,” Jason says. “And for Kristina, she’s really someone who has spent a lot of her time at home since she’s had kids and put [her] career ambitions aside. I think that after going through this year that she went through, that voice of, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ was speaking to her.
“She realized she doesn’t want to waste time, because time is precious.”