Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Jesse Grant/Variety, Frazer Harrison, Christian Rose/Roger Viollet, Michael Loccisano, Archive Photos, Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE), Erika Goldring/WireImage, Bennett Raglin/CBS, Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
While parenting is never easy, Adam Pally says his kids — who are 13, 12, and 8 — have essentially been cool since birth. He’s not sure how they got that way, but he jokes his eldest, Cole, was born wearing a beanie “and not the ones they put on babies at the hospital — like, a cool, orange one with a Carhartt label.” Cole, Pally says, even used his bar-mitzvah clothing budget to buy a vintage suit and a tub of La Mer facial moisturizer. (“I was like, ‘What the hell do you know from La Mer?’”)
And while Pally knows that it’s possible that some of his own coolness and that of his wife, Danielle, must have rubbed off on his kids somehow, he says it’s never a conscious move. “One of the things I learned early on is that showing your kids your favorite stuff is a recipe for you to be disappointed about your kid,” he says. “You have to wait. There have been so many times when I have been like, ‘You guys are gonna love this movie,’ and within five minutes my kids are like, ‘Can I go on my iPad?’” In essence, he says, you have to let your kids discover cool stuff on their own.
To his kids, though, cool stuff wouldn’t include anything he’s done. “My kids are very unimpressed with my work, and they get that genetically from their mother,” Pally says. “My youngest son, Drake, is obsessed with Ben Schwartz and he’ll call him and talk through Sonic theories, and I’m always like, ‘You know, I’m actually in the movie, too.” He’ll just shoot back, ‘Yeah, like for a second.’ They don’t care, and that’s great.”
Here’s what Pally’s kids, whom he calls his “three beautiful mistakes,” do care about, from Shemar Moore to Sabrina Carpenter.
Photo: Erika Goldring/WireImage
My eldest son [who’s almost 14] has unbelievable musical taste, and he’s always showing me bands, like MJ Lenderman and Geese, which I end up loving. My son is actually so mad at me right now because the premiere for my [HBO comedy] special is tomorrow night and MJ Lenderman is playing in New York. I’d promised that I’d take him when they came to New York, and I had to say, “I can’t take you,” like the worst showbiz dad. He said he understood, but I’m definitely going to hear about it again eventually in some one-man show.
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We went on vacation in Italy this summer, which was so amazing. And at one point, we were driving, just me and him, through the hills of Tuscany and he was playing me all this music, like Goose. And I was like, “Have you ever heard Neil Young’s Harvest?” And he was like, “No,” and I was like,”Oh. Could we maybe listen to that for a second?” And the rest of the vacation, my son was walking around singing “Old Man.” I was like, “There you go. You just gotta listen to your old man a little bit.”
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Morning is the time when me and the three kids really hang out, and that’s when the aux cord gets passed around a bunch. My daughter has really good 13-year-old girl taste, so Sabrina Carpenter is really in right now, Olivia Rodrigo was last year, and we had a summer of Dua Lipa, too.
When my daughter brought the Chappell Roan album, I was like, “This is amazing,” and the Sabrina Carpenter record’s great, too. It’s all so much more palatable than the stuff that my sisters listened to when they were that age, like O-Town.
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My youngest son is really into Japanese rap now, which he got into through that Megan Thee Stallion song “Mamushi.” It led him down a rabbit hole, so whenever he gets the aux cord now, we get to listen to Japanese rap, which is really good.
It’s just great to have five cool people in the car. My wife’s musical taste is really interesting, because she loves soul music, and then she loves stuff that would be at Lilith Fair. Ask anybody that’s been in the car with us. It’s fun to be in the car with the Pallys.
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My daughter also has a deep love of ABBA. I think it happened because I took her to [holographic concert] ABBA: Voyages when I was in London shooting Knuckles. It was just me and her, and watching her watch the show, it was like I saw her mind just open up.
Photo: Bennett Raglin/CBS
Because time is a flat circle, my daughter also loves procedurals. Her favorite thing to do is curl up in my bed while I’m reading, and then she and my wife watch an old episode of FBI or something. It’s like I’ve raised a 65-year-old divorcée.
I think what she really responds to about procedurals is just how easy they are. I also think she has one of her first crushes on that dude that has the goatee that covers his whole chin from S.W.A.T., Shemar Moore.
Photo: Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images
I have two boys that are really into sports, so Knicks game nights are big in our house. Even my daughter gets into it.
Loving the Knicks was really my curse, but I, in turn, bestowed it on them. Loving a sports team can become like a ritual, really, and in a lot of ways, they’re more important than religion or where you’re from. When we were in Los Angeles, loving the Knicks was a sense of pride for my kids, because it meant they were different. Now that we’re back in New York, the Knicks are just part of the fabric of the city. When they’re good, the city is obsessed with them and my kids love that vibe. They love that they can get off school and take the train to Madison Square Garden and meet me, too.
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For about the past year, we’ve been doing game nights where we play stuff like Monopoly and Scrabble and Life. We just pick whatever the youngest one won’t freak out about.
I don’t want this to seem like I’m anti-screen — I’ll shove screens in my kids’ faces all day long — but we felt like when we’d try to do movie night or TV night as a family, we were losing [the kids to their own screens]. That’s why we started to play games, because it’s just so nice to have their attention. We end up talking about school and friends, and you get an hour or so of their time until they lose interest, which inevitably happens, or we get bored or someone gets mad at someone else.
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