![]() Paquin lead a pitch-perfect cast the first time around - there's no denying that. Although the original series may have overstayed its welcome, we'd surely be excited to see a potential True Blood reboot. The series is a gory, funny and brilliant take on the vampire story, incorporating themes of civil rights. The popular supernatural series ran for seven seasons, airing from 2008 to 2014. By day three or four – oh, this is going to sound so syrupy – but I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her."īased on the Sookie Stackhouse novel series by Charlaine Harris, HBO's hit show delighted fans with its tales of vampires, werewolves, and fairies. "I didn’t see her for three months, and she had gone from having dark hair to this beautiful blond, and I had gone from being blond to this dark vampire. We were both single at the time, and there was just this kind of spark,” co-star Moyer once told People, adding that things really started to sizzle when filming began. It still feels like a story that didn’t need retelling.Fun fact: Paquin met her real-life husband Stephen Moyer on True Blood. Strong performances, a sensitive tone and high production values mean A Friend of the Family is solid drama. The narrative incorporates time-hops, a frustrating structural device which plagues far too many series nowadays, while nine episodes feels unnecessarily bloated. Yet this is far too niche to truly be a cautionary tale. She tells viewers that she wanted her experiences dramatised because "so many people think that something like this could never happen to them – especially at the hands of someone they know and trust. A sunny soundtrack of all-American pop-rock (The Monkees, The Mamas & the Papas, Glen Campbell) adds to the disquieting atmosphere.Īs if to head off accusations of exploitation, the series opens with a straight-to-camera speech by the real Jan Broberg, now 60. This is slow-building domestic horror, with shadowy silhouettes lurking at bedroom windows. Hanks and Anna Paquin humanise the gullible Brobergs, while young Hendrix Yancey is heartbreakingly vulnerable as Jan. Lacy’s square-jawed, smirking bonhomie lends him a sinister edge, while his needy catchphrase is “Who do you love the most, other than your mum and dad?”, to which the Broberg children chorus: “You, Brother B!”. “Is that a medical term?” mumbles Bob Broberg (Colin Hanks), Jan's father, nervously adjusting his specs.īerchtold is played with chilling menace by Jake Lacy, last seen as the entitled honeymooner in The White Lotus. “Do you know what a paedophile is?” asks an FBI agent. It’s partly down to the naivety of the period, especially in devoutly religious suburban America. The series does a decent job of explaining how this belief-beggaring deception ever came to pass. “He loves our children like they’re his own.” “He’s practically a member of our family,” insist the Brobergs. Throughout the sorry saga, sociopathic Berchtold maintained a wholesome veneer of friendship, hence the drama’s title. This happened to involve them marrying and procreating. It’s a harrowing tale of victims not just opening the door to evil but cooking it a slap-up steak dinner, then letting it babysit.īerchtold’s obsession with Jan led to him grooming the entire Broberg family and seducing both parents, while stealthily drugging Jan and brainwashing her into believing they’d been given a world-saving secret mission by aliens. For several years during the 1970s, Idaho furniture salesman Robert “B” Berchtold expertly manipulated his neighbours, the Brobergs, so he could sexually abuse and repeatedly kidnap their young daughter, Jan. Sure, it’s an eyebrow-raising case but do we really need to keep raking over it?Īnyway, on with the weirder-than-fiction show. Now it’s been dramatised for this nine-part series. She is described as the mother of three daughters, whose life has felt safe, happy, and rewarding until recently. Three years ago to be precise, on the estimable Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight. Anna Paquin will star in the series as Jan's mother Mary Ann Broberg. Eventually I realised that I’d seen this story before. Midway through episode one of A Friend of the Family (Peacock/Sky), I had a distracting sense of déjà vu. It’s a measure of how much true crime is on TV that it’s all starting to blur into one amorphous, mildly ghoulish mass.
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