Making way too long, way too late indirect scripted adaptations of sloppy Netflix true crime documentaries doesn’t seem like a winning business plan. But six months after playing informally tiger king in the almost invisible hammy joe vs. Carole, Peacock has given the limited series treatment to 2019’s Kidnapped in plain sight.
Kidnapped in plain sight — one of those Netflix releases that come without any promotion, everyone talks about for three days and then is never mentioned again — was annoying and tacky at the same time. At just 91 minutes, it was either wildly repetitive or repeatedly raging, and the idea that Peacock’s A friend of the family Jan Broberg’s harrowingly bizarre story in nine hours immediately caused me a sensation.
A friend of the family
It comes down to
A wild story told with sensitivity, but too much padding.
Based on six episodes sent to critics, A friend of the family is simultaneously doomed by that structural choice and close to a best-case scenario. With director Eliza Hittman setting an admirably understated opening note (she directs the first and third episodes), the show is stretched far beyond the bounds of my interest, and his insights plateau early, but at least it’s sensitively told and the small ensemble is usually great.
The series was created by Nick Antosca and bears some resemblance to his Hulu minis The deed and Sweets, relying on expensive and bad hairpieces to find a subtle heart in stories that might otherwise lean towards the sensational. I thought it totally worked The deedrarely on Sweets and comes down somewhere in the middle A friend of the family.
Set in Idaho in the 1970s, A friend of the family focuses on the Brobergs – florist Bob (Colin Hanks, a rare weak link lost under a bald cap), housewife Mary Ann (Anna Paquin) and their brood of laughing children, including preteen aspiring actress Jan (Hendrix Yancey for four episodes and then McKenna Elegance). The Brobergs seem like the perfect Mormon clan, and they catch the attention of newcomers Robert (Jake Lacy) and Gail (Lio Tipton) Berchtold – also Mormon – and their own laughing children. The two families become close. Extremely close. Disturbingly close.
It’s hard to know who would ever watch A friend of the family without seeing Kidnapped in plain sight or reading Jan’s memoirs Stoll innocence first, so it may or may not be spoiler-y to reveal that Robert’s real obsession is with Jan; his multi-year grooming process — with the help of aliens called Zeta and Zethra — involves the entire Broberg family; and he kidnaps Jan twice. The whole thing stuns both the legal system and the religious community.
Brother B, as he likes to be called, is a charismatic sociopath and the easygoing villain, but more than a few viewers of the documentary were almost as outraged by Bob and Mary Ann, parents whose ignorance and indulgence were impossible to see from the outside. Think of this as the inside story. Jan and Mary Ann Broberg are producers here, with Jan introducing the first episode of a soundstage with a reminder that as incredible as the plot is, it all really happened. although kidnapped director Skye Borgman is an advisory producer on the Peacock series, Jan’s preamble might as well be, “OK, so now here’s the version where you can really empathize with us.” It situates A friend of the family as the story of an “authorized” victim, an important consideration in the ever-troublesome space of true crime.
Yet nine hours of self-justification is a lot, and it’s true A friend of the family spends most of his time. The Brobergs got caught up in this situation because B was a con artist alongside a predator – the role makes perfect use of Lacy’s innate duality, in which he’s best cast as the most decent or most demented person in any room – and because, like Jan’s intro also tells us it was a different time.
Hittman, who last directed the potent of 2020 Never Seldom Sometimes Always, emphasizes small gestures and reactions, with the camera seemingly capturing every sideways glance or sullen touch. Small exchanges take on an intimate weight, resulting in a series about ongoing sex crimes that, in terms of what you actually see on camera, wouldn’t be too daring to be televised. It’s a smart tactic to keep the show from ever getting exploitative. But when everything that came across as blatantly, horrifying, and inevitably grotesque in the documentary here is merely disturbing and shrouded in a superficial haze of 1970s nostalgia, it’s easy to go from “How on earth could they have been so stupid?” ?” to “How could they have known?” And when two of the figures most obviously manipulated are producers of your series, it reads as selfish rather than revealing.
A friend of the family plays with a contrast between the incomprehensible behavior that is central to the story – FBI agents don’t even know the term “pedophile” yet – and the sheltered space in which the action takes place. In collaboration with cinematographers Celina Cardenas and Hilda Mercado, directors play every style from the 1970s, as if the Brobergs and Berchtolds were living less in the 1970s and more in a Brady Bunch/partridge family/Waltons version – one in which Vietnam and Watergate never happened, where darkness never invaded.
With production designer John Kretschmer and costume designer Rebecca Gregg leading the way, it’s a world of wood-paneled station wagons, lurid bellbottoms, and radios playing wall-to-wall cornball hits from the likes of Captain & Tennille. It’s a petri dish that cultivates a viral load of normality, so exaggerated and all-consuming that you can see a Bob Berchtold (or a John Wayne Gacy or a Jeffrey Dahmer, if you’re working on a real crime trend piece) could hide out of control. It’s very similar to the way Antosca dealt with the more contemporary settings in The deed and Sweets. Almost 40 years afterBlue velvetit’s hard to imagine being so proud of the discovery that behind every suburban patina hides darkness and rot, however skillfully presented.
There is very little that A friend of the family tells the sixth episode that it hadn’t been thoroughly covered in the second hour. It’s the cast that might keep you busy. Hittman is masterful with young actors — see Sidney Flanagan and Talia Ryder in Never Seldom Sometimes Always – and Yancey is amazingly authentic, showing us how Jan thrives under B’s kindness and struggles with his lies in heartbreaking ways. Grace is much more studied as a performer, which is perfect for when Jan’s growing understanding of her situation begins to tear her apart.
Paquin is like a china doll in and through Pocatello, Idaho, and she comes alive for a moment when B takes her out of that box, only to crumple in ways that are indeed more sympathetic than anything the documentary suggests. Paquin describes Mary Ann’s motivations and does it well, but I was much more intrigued by Tipton, who makes a heartbreaking and complicated character almost out of nowhere. Tipton is not an intuitive casting – they are a… America’s next top model finalist playing a character repeatedly suggested he was a wallflower – and I don’t know if the writers really understand Gail, but the actor brings a layer of tragedy to the role. Gail’s bright, expressive eyes are often dull, as if she has to make peace over and over by marrying a monster.
And again and again. And again and again. Until it’s all over-rationalized and over-excused.
I didn’t think I was interested in a longer version of the Kidnapped in plain sight story. I was a little wrong. Thanks to Hittman’s light touch and the appearances of Yancey, Lacy, Paquin and Tipton, A friend of the family carries an eerie, provocative threat. But it still doesn’t have six hours, let alone nine. I appreciated what I appreciated, but nevertheless I have no desire to see the story to the end.