‘Party of Five’ reboot focuses on deportation
A popular 1990s teen drama is getting a reboot featuring a Mexican American family.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. >> “Party of Five,” a 1990s teen drama that focused on a family grappling with life after the death of their parents, is getting a reboot with a Mexican American family whose parents are deported.
Disney announced this month that the Sony Pictures Television retooled Generation X-era show will air on the Freeform network and will star a Latino cast.
The new series is headed by the shows original creators Amy Lippman and Christopher Keyser comes as millions of Latinos in the U.S. wrestle with the uncertainty around deportations and aggressive immigration enforcement under the Trump Administration.
The original series, which ran from 1994 to 2000 on Fox, centered on the Salinger family whose parents died in a car accident caused by a drunk driver.
The new show will follow the Acosta children as they work through an unsettling future when their parents are abruptly deported to Mexico. It will star Brandon Larracuente, Emily Tosta, Niko Guardado and Elle Paris Legaspi.
Lippman told The Associated Press she and Keyser have turned down previous offers to bring back the show over concerns they didn’t want to simply recycle the same storyline with new actors. But she said the pair changed their minds after reading front-page newspaper stories about Latino children being separated from their parents.
“We have told this story before but it was imaginary,” Lippman said. “Now it’s actually a story that is playing out all over the country.”