Summary
Subtle and filled with more nuance than you might expect, A Friend of the Family benefits greatly from being subtle in its depiction of the horrifying details of Jan Broberg’s kidnapping, and other series like it might be better at learning from its example.
This review of the Peacock series A Friend of the Family season 1 does not contain spoilers.
It sometimes feels like the viewer can’t move through the television schedules or the copious blocks of programming available on streaming services without seeing an avalanche of true crime documentaries, most of which are now proving to be fertile ground for television drama writers wanting to reconstruct the events of those very same stories with big name casts and prestige production values.
Ryan Murphy has somewhat cornered the market here in the last few years with his American Crime Story strand, and recent Netflix smash hit centred on the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the latter of which brings a sensationalist eye to that story characteristic of so much of his work. Created by Nick Antosca, A Friend of the Family manages to take a story that on paper would seem unbelievable if fictional and turn it into something with understated nuance and an unflinching portrayal of emotional horror.
Make no mistake, the story of Jan Broberg (played at differing ages by Hendrix Yancey and McKenna Grace) and the horrors she and her family faced at the hands of Robert Berchtold (Jake Lacy) are never played down. In fact, the more subtle stylings displayed here by directors such as Eliza Hittman of Never Rarely Sometimes Always fame makes the story here that much more distressing for how matter of factly it’s being played despite the, frequently at times, unbelievable nature of so many of this story’s details.
It potently and brilliantly captures the naive air of the 1970s, an era of lunchboxes that displayed The Brady Bunch, where jigsaw puzzles was considered evening entertainment and The Waltons was the biggest series on American television. Nobody ever mentions that they keep their backdoor unlocked, but you can imagine that would be the case. When the very nature of Berchtold himself is revealed to Jan Broberg’s family when she is missing, Bob Broberg’s reaction is a beautifully played one by Colin Hanks primarily because it sells in a matter of seconds just how oblivious previous generations were to the predatory nature of a character and the crimes of someone like Berchtold.
Both Anna Paquin and Colin Hanks brilliantly portray a suburban married couple in crisis here, confronted with a horror and a scenario that is all too real and who have been manipulated in a ways that the other has no idea about, while Jake Lacy, fresh from his committed turn as a male Karen in The White Lotus, manages to make the skin crawl in increasingly horrifying ways as the series continues. The MVPs of the series however, are Hendrix Yancey and McKenna Grace as Jan Broberg, both of whom manage to fully convince and convey that they are in fact the one character at differing ages.
Grace has been a scene stealer in so many things the last few years (The Haunting of Hill House, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), but this is a magnificently mature performance from the actress, capturing in vivid detail the horror and impact that comes from a childhood of abuse, subsequently putting it above so many scripted series of this ilk.
A Friend of the Family will prove a tough watch, but mostly because it doesn’t try to oversell the horror in the manner so many scripted series based on true crimes try to do. Some may crave the sensationalist approach of other more recent series, but this is all the more powerful for effectively pushing that approach to side in favour of being a more nuanced concoction.
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