The kids check in on parents
‘Party of Five’ reboot co-creator details the visit to deported dad and mom in Mexico.
The original “Party of Five” revolved around a group of white siblings forced to raise themselves after their parents died in a car crash. Nearly two decades later, Freeform’s reboot, set in Echo Park, follows the Acosta siblings as they cope with the ongoing effects of their parents being deported.
Now, in the final stretch of its first season, “Party of Five” has taken its story to Mexico.
The season’s penultimate episode, “Mexico,” explored the unraveling marriage between Javier and
Gloria (played by Bruno Bichir and Fernanda Urrejola) as they make a new life in their homeland. In addition, the episode dealt with the window dressing the spouses and the Acosta children — Lucia (Emily Tosta), Beto (Niko Guardado, Valentina (Elle Paris Legaspi) and baby Rafa (twins Briana and Arianna Cardenas alternating in the role) — put on to avoid a discordant reunion. Big bro and stand-in patriarch Emilio (Brandon Larracuente), meanwhile, is back home due to his DACA status.
The Times spoke with Amy Lippman, co-creator of the original “Party of Five” and the reboot, about what’s in store for Wednesday’s season finale, how to ensure authentic treatment of the subject matter and whether the series is intended as a form of activism.
In the penultimate episode, we see the siblings, sans Emilio, in Mexico to visit their parents. What does this set up for the finale?
I started the year thinking it’d be really interesting, if for some reason Lucia is really lacking a mother and she goes by herself to Mexico. That was all I had at the beginning of the year — one kid going. And then, once we told the third-to-last episode where Valentina runs away, we realized: Why wouldn’t all of them go?
They all have issues they’re dealing with. It can be investigated once they’re reunited with their parents, and then, for me, I got very excited when I thought, “Well, what if we tell the story of what happened to the parents?” We haven’t seen the parents; we’ve no idea what their story is, and what happens if those kids arrived, and we find out those parents are on the verge of separating? Instead of your assumption that their struggle is identical, they are missing their children in identical ways, why not see what happens to a couple where there’s blame, where one is grieving in a way that the other isn’t, where one is trying to move on and the other can’t?
There’s this idea that if only we can be united all our problems will be over, and that’s not true. Even being reunited is not the answer to all their problems because things have changed for all of them over the course of the year . ... The season completely takes a turn with one line of dialogue, which is when they go and collect Valentina at the border and she says: “What happens now?” And Emilio says: “Well, now you keep going.”
I will say, without giving away what happens, we end the season in ways that the audience will not expect. The way we leave at the end of the season suggests a whole new story in the second season. Nothing will be the same as a result of the way we end the first season. Now, I never thought I’d do a cliffhanger, but it is a cliffhanger.
There’s a lot of thinking to be done about the second season. Everyone’s a little on edge because we don’t know what’s going to happen with the Writers Guild — whether there’s going to be a strike coming. But I’m thinking about it and I’m watching how people respond to the episodes.
What inspired this look into the marital strife that can result from these situations?
We made a decision not to see the parents — except fleetingly and only from the kids’ perspectives — for most of the season, because we wanted to focus on the immediate effects the deportation had on the kids. But it goes without saying that the stress of a situation like the Acostas’ isn’t felt only by the people left behind. And yet the focus isn’t generally on the people headed back to their homelands who have to start their lives all over again. It made sense to us that Gloria and Javier would deal with their predicament differently; Javier would try to remain forward-thinking and practical, but that Gloria would be consumed by grief, unable to make peace with the decision to leave their youngest child behind.
There’s been a lot of conversation recently about who should be telling certain stories. And you’ve talked about how, at the beginning of this venture, it was important for you to staff the writers room with people that could speak to this experience, or have a connection to it, in a way that maybe you didn’t have. Talk about what you were feeling diving into this premise.
I would hate to think that the only things that I can write about as a person of a certain ethnicity is to use my own experience. If you sort of broaden that out, it means I have no authority to write about men, or I have no authority to write about Catholics, or I have no authority to write about the transgender community. I think if you say to a writer, “You can’t credibly tell a story about anyone except yourself,” I think we are limiting the stories that people can write. I think what’s important is that a writer, like myself, doesn’t claim any authority over anyone’s experience, and actually writes of another person’s experience in as informed a way as possible.
So for example, from the beginning, Chris [Keyser] and I, who created the show together, felt like we needed to have a point of view informed by someone whose own experience sort of skewed closer to the experience of the Acostas. I ran a writers room where I felt that it was really important that any story we told was vetted by people who had a closer experience than I to the experience of the characters. I wouldn’t presume to say that I speak for a Latinx community. I feel like I should be allowed to imagine stories outside my own personal experience, as long as they are informed by people who really do have, like, ownership over a certain experience. And it’s really tricky. Over the course of the season, the conversations that we had in the room were so dynamic and informative and challenging. And what I really realized is that there is no one way to tell anyone’s story. And that speaks to not only the plight of the Acostas, but, for example, we have a transgender character on the show. And that story line is informed by consultants and members of the LGBTQ community.
I think what becomes the issue is, if you’re not writing from experience or a connection to it, are you doing the homework to tell it authentically versus relying on tropes or your limited idea of whatever it is.
From the beginning, before anything was written, we brought in a Latinx writer to help us with very first episode. It wasn’t like we only relied on the story that had been told before, that we transposed to a Latinx family. We knew it had to have qualities that were really unique to their circumstances, so that we just couldn’t rely on what we’ve done before. Every single episode was read by everyone in the room, we had consultants, we had endless conversations about them. It was really important to me that people could look at the show and relate to it and that it be authentic.
I’m concerned that the takeaway of that conversation is that people cannot write experiences that are not their own. If that’s the takeaway, I think we’re going to limit people who are really well-intended and who want to explore experiences other than their own. I don’t want to be circumscribed in that way. I want to be able to imagine and create situations that are unfamiliar to me.
Immigration remains a polarizing issue in the U.S., particularly under the current administration. Do you view the show as a form of activism?
I don’t, actually. What was more interesting to do was just tell the story of a family that was in this situation — is that activism? I don’t know. I wasn’t looking to make huge pronouncements. I have a point of view about it. The show does have a point of view that families belong together. But I think if you could attribute any kind of activism to the show it’s that we are looking with empathy at a family that has been separated by the United States’ present immigration policy. That’s what we’re doing: We’re saying, “This is what it would be like.” People can watch the show and say, “That is the result of their own choices.” There are characters on the show that espouse that point of view, and they’re not villainous. In the second episode, we have a character who is herself Mexican American and she says, “You disadvantage us when you come to the country this way.” I think that is a point of view that people have.
I felt like my only obligation was to tell a story about what it might be like to have people who have looked at those situations and seen them on the front page of papers read the headlines and said, “That is something other than me; I don’t know what that would feel like; I don’t relate to that” — and then to actually say these are families like any other family. They are people who embrace the American dream. Some of their kids don’t speak Spanish. They run a business, they drive the cars. There was a deliberate choice to make them relatable to an American audience as a family living in Los Angeles and trying to get by. That was a way of allowing the audience to perhaps see their own experience reflected in the experience of a Latinx family that has to deal with deportation issues.