A Party I'm Glad to Come To: The Party of Five Reboot

When Party of Five premiered on Fox in the fall of 1994, it wasn’t received with the same kind of reverence that My So-Called Life did, but it was worshiped by nearly as many teenagers and adults alike. Dealing with the Salinger family, trying to stay together after their parents were taken from them by a drunk driver, their struggles to stay together would be mapped with some of the most grueling obstacles any TV teenagers would deal with - teenage alcoholism, bouts with cancer, battered wife syndrome – it would’ve been torture had showrunners Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman not gone to such trouble to make us love the Salinger family. It also helped matters that it would have one of the great assemblages of young adult actors in history – Matthew Fox, Scott Wolf, Neve Campbell, Lacey Chabert and Jennifer Love Hewitt just to name the leads. It was a wonderful series, but it was constantly struggling for survival, and the fact that it lasted six seasons was, frankly, a miracle.

In the age of the reboot, discussions of bringing back Party of Five have been playing around the last few years. But Keyser and Lippman have taken a far more imaginative approach to the Freeform version that debuted earlier this year. Rather than even attempt to bring the cast back, they’ve decided on the same basic scenario but a completely different cast and format – its still set in LA, but it deals with the Acosta family, a group of Mexican Americans. And rather than have the parents be killed off, the Acosta family has to deal with their parents being deported. (I realize that there’s a certain kind of viewer that is going to find this whole approach propaganda, but be honest; if you’re tuning into the network that brings you The Bold Type and Good Trouble, you’re generally a lot more open minded than that.). The Acostas otherwise brak down much the same way that the Salingers did: there’s Emilio, the 24 year old aspiring musician brought back into the family after the catastrophe, Lucia and Beto (twins, instead of being one older and one younger) both sixteen, trying to live a difficult teenager life; Lucia’s the brain, Beto the womanizer, Valentina, the adolescent who feels her parents loss the strongest, and the baby, who is there as a reminder of what the parents left behind.

There’s a certain similarity in the story going forward – there’s a tension between Emilio trying to be the father, and the fact that Beto and Lucia don’t respect him. There are problems with trying to keep the business afloat (which I think was actually less of a problem in the first season), there are romances brewing between Emilio and the babysitter they’ve hired, and there are the nicknames between the siblings (yes, Beto is called ‘Bay’ by everybody.) But there are a fair amount of new wrinkles: the biggest of which is that the parents aren’t dead, and are still trying to maintain a contact with the children they left behind. In a way, this makes a lot of the drama more wrenching than having them dead,  as not only the children still trying to find their own ways with the parents there and yet not there, but the parents are dealing with their own agonies from being away from their children. The writers also go out of their way to add the wrinkle is that none of the issues that they had initially have gone away: Emilio is dealing with obstacles with his father, who isn’t willing to let him live his own life before the deportation.

The inevitable comparisons and brickbats will come from those fans of the original who don’t like seeing anything from the past changed one scintilla and certainly not with actors who aren’t white. But I have a feeling that Keyser and Lippman have chosen the right network and right time for this particular reinvention of Party of Five.  It’ll probably play better with people who have no memory of the original, but no matter what your opinion, this is an engaging well-written series, and certainly far better than most of the reboots that we tend to get. It’s not a perfect series yet, by any means, but heck, it took a couple of episodes from them to hit their stride. This will be a series that everybody wants to watch.

My score: 4 stars.