Parents' Guide to Firefly Lane

This Is Us has primed viewers for seeing characters in multiple timelines, but Katherine Heigl's simultaneously soapy and serious dive into two best friends' relationship is almost whiplash inducing. Firefly Lane jumps from decade to decade in a manner that's supposed to give us fresh insights into BFFs Tully Hart (Heigl) and Kate Mularkey (Sarah Chalke) mid-lives -- from the '60s when Heigl's character Tully is 8 and her mother yanks her from her grandmother's care, to the '70s when she's raped by a date at 14 and Tully and Kate become inseparable, to the '80s when she's an ambitious TV news personality and the two work together at a small Seattle TV station, to the 2000s, when she's an Oprah-like figure whose private life is ... messy.

The show is disappointing because the premise and the bones are good. Both the leads glide easily between the comic and the serious material; the actors who play Tully and Kate as teens (Ali Skovbye and Roan Curtis) are believable and heartbreaking as their younger selves. Frustratingly, there's too much here that strains credulity, from the friends going through every phase of their lives joined at the hip, to the ludicrously luxurious lakefront Seattle home Kate has as an adult (on a news producer's salary?), to Tully becoming an Oprah-level star, to multiple instances of ill-advised tabletop dancing, to the many, many times Kate has to forgive Tully being Tully. As Kate's surname signals, on a ride down Firefly Lane, beware of malarkey.