RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Party of Five reboot tells the story of a family facing the immigration crackdown
Party of Five
Wednesdays, W Network/abc Spark
Viewers have earned the right to be picky — and even disdainful — when it comes to the steady excess of TV reboots, resurrections and revivals. Not only do such shows feed a troubling nostalgia addiction in our popular culture, they prevent progress and true innovation. For every reboot that crowds the schedule, an original idea is lost at sea.
Still, there’s nothing wrong with showing some compassion for the stronger efforts. Freeform’s capable and compelling rendition of Party of Five, from the same creators who brought us the 1990s hit drama about five orphaned siblings, makes a more than adequate case for do-overs.
This Party of Five is about a
Los Angeles family, the Acostas, whose lives are turned upside down when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raid Los Cantaritos, the casual Mexican restaurant owned by parents Javier (Bruno Bichir) and Gloria (Fernanda Urrejola).
Tipped off that ICE is on its way, Javier hustles his undocumented kitchen employees out the back door, never dreaming that the agents have come for him and Gloria instead. They’ve spent two decades building a family and a business, paying taxes and pledging their patriotism — yet, indeed, they themselves lack the necessary proof. (“You think the rules don’t apply to you?” one of the officers growls. “Things have changed, Mr. Acosta, I need to see your papers.”) They’re arrested and sent to a detention centre, where they await a deportation hearing.
That’s an immediate, and topical, swerve from the original series, where the parents of the Salinger siblings were killed in a car crash. Yet the result is tonally similar: The Acosta children — four siblings and a baby brother — are left to fend for themselves, juggling school, child care and restaurant management in one fell swoop while also trying to hire the best legal aid for their parents.
Oldest brother Emilio (Brandon Larracuente), an infant when his parents hiked a desert to get to the United States, is a striving musician with an increasingly jeopardized “dreamer” status. Beyond that, he’s preoccupied with fronting his band, the Natural Disasters. (Talk about a ’90s throwback: His grunge-lite performances would be right at home in the old series.)
The remaining four Acosta siblings are natural-born citizens who are so Americanized that they never learned to speak much Spanish. Twins Lucia (Emily Tosta) and Beto (Niko Guardado) are high schoolers with opposite problems: She’s a gifted student straining against authority figures; he’s a happy-go-lucky jock in danger of flunking half his classes. Kid sister Valentina (Elle Paris Legaspi) is the family genius, skipping grades in math but also the most visibly traumatized by what’s happened. Their baby brother, Rafael, is an adorable reminder of big change (who always needs changing).
The echoes to the first series are apparent but not forced. Creators Amy Lippman and Christopher Keyser have put great thought and empathy into telling the Acosta family’s story in all the ways that it would naturally differ from the Salinger days, using the opportunity to give viewers a solid, up-close experience of how easily U.S. immigration policy (and its blunt enforcement) can tear apart a good, law-abiding family. That in itself is an overdue idea for a TV drama.
When an immigration court judge denies Javier and Gloria’s appeal and they are deported to Mexico, Lucia angrily argues with the officers taking her parents away. “Dignity, mi hija,” Javier tells his daughter, from behind a chain-link fence. “Show them who we are.”
“They don’t care who we are, Papi,” Lucia says. “Don’t you see that by now?”
“We’ll show ourselves,” Javier replies.
Where the Salinger kids processed the grief of their parents’ deaths, the Acosta kids must cope with a different kind of loss — made better and worse by constant video chats, texts and calls from their parents.
When an out-of-work psychology major, Vanessa (Amanda Arcuri), joins the restaurant staff as a hostess (and quickly becomes Emilio’s lover), she diagnoses a modern-age problem, thanks to iphones and ipads: The parents are still too enmeshed in what happens with the kids and the restaurant, which compounds the stress and the pain.
Then and now, Party of Five relies on the idea that the kids must find their own way.