Frank Murphy Hasn’t Had a Good Day Since 1973

Frank Murphy is a man losing a war against his own life, and Bill Burr has built several seasons of television around that premise. F is for Family is set in a mid-seventies American suburb, but the decade is a costume more than a setting. The real subject is the particular hangover of masculine disappointment—what happens to a man who was told that authority and hard work would be enough, and finds out they aren’t.

Frank works at a regional airline, loses that job, fights with his teenage son Kevin in the way men who don’t know how to be vulnerable fight with their children—loudly, reflexively, with a cruelty neither of them fully intends. His younger son Billy is soft in ways that confuse Frank. His daughter Maureen runs feral with the neighbor kids, indifferent to everything Frank thinks matters. His wife Sue runs a knockoff Tupperware operation out of the house, quietly building something of her own that Frank hasn’t quite registered. The family exists at the specific temperature where love and resentment have lived together so long they’ve stopped being distinguishable.

What Burr gets right—and this is what keeps me watching—is the texture of the period without the nostalgia. The casual brutality that passed for parenting. The financial dread underneath suburban facades. Kevin’s arc hits hardest. There’s something in the dynamic between a father who communicates in threats and a son who just wants to be heard that doesn’t feel like historical detail. It feels precisely like now.

The animation is thick-lined, seventies-palette, aggressively unslick—perfectly suited to the material. Three seasons in and F is for Family remains the most underrated show on Netflix. Bill Burr is a genius asshole, and this is his best work.