'The Family': So Many Secrets, So Hard to Care
The degree to which you become involved in the new domestic drama The Family depends on how much you believe that a single event can alter and utterly redefine a family. In this production, a young man who has been gone for a decade — he was thought dead, murdered — returns home to find that his absence has altered the trajectory of every other member of his family.
The show, which premieres Thursday night on ABC, is structured in a way that crisscrosses back and forth between the ten-year span. One moment, we see the boy, Adam (Liam James), playful and curious, horsing around with his parents, Claire and John Warren (Joan Allen and Rupert Graves) and his siblings Danny and Willa (Friday Night Lights’s Zach Gilford and The Newsroom’s Alison Pill). Then flash-forward to a morose, emotionally hollowed-out clan minus Adam, going through the motions of life.
The drama is kicked off with the boy’s sudden return. He’s dazed and confused, but claims to be Adam, and the family believes him. This means, among many other reverberations, that a neighborhood man (Andrew McCarthy), falsely imprisoned for years for Adam’s murder, is released and given a healthy settlement by the court for his trouble. He returns to the neighborhood and finds he’s still met with lingering suspicion. Another subplot: the police must face the idea that they botched the original investigation, especially Margot Billingham’s Sgt. Nina Meyer, who we learn had an affair with Graves’ John Warren.
Adam’s reappearance also throws a monkey wrench into Claire’s budding gubernatorial campaign. (She’s running to be governor of Maine, yet this family sounds like the least likely bunch of Mainers I’ve seen on TV in some time — they’re clearly vacationers who’ve established residency. Still, Claire is patently better than real-life governor Paul LePage. Stephen King will get a good chuckle out of all this.)
Really, Adam’s return seems more than anything else like a nuisance to the Warren clan. “It’s been 10 years, he’s supposed to be dead!” says Danny petulantly. Like, man, it would be so much easier if he was six feet under!
After watching two episodes, it occurred to me that Joan Allen’s character makes very little sense. Claire is positioned as a savvy, iron-willed, ambitious politician, but she’s also so dim about the psychoanalytic process that she berates a therapist working with Adam to hurry his healing process along by yelling, “You’re supposed to fix him!,” as though the hapless kid was a burst pipe or a leaky faucet.
You’re meant to get hooked in the mystery of Danny and the reactions he provokes. Where’s he been? Who really kidnapped him? Was he kidnapped? Is this Adam the original Adam? Why did one member of the family apparently frame Hank? I can’t say I was very intrigued by these provocative questions, mostly because The Family does such a poor job of dramatizing them in a lively, believable manner. It may be one of those shows that lasts at least one season with an audience that just wants to hang around long enough to see all the secrets revealed.
The Family airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. at ABC.