Disney Rebooting ‘Party of Five’ with Deportation Plot and an Immigrant Family

Partyofive1
Columbia Pictures Television

The Disney-owned cable network Freeform is set to reboot the popular 1990s family drama Party of Five, but this time the family at the heart of the show will be a family of illegal aliens.

Freeform announced the re-make of the drama that aired for six seasons from 1994 to 2000, but with a twist on the “missing parents” theme of the show, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In the original series, the five young people who starred had become orphaned when their parents died in a car accident. The series then chronicled the siblings’ efforts to cope with the loss and to continue on as a family with the eldest son in charge. But in the re-make of the series, Freeform announced that instead of being killed in a car accident, the Mexican immigrant family’s mother and father would have been deported back to Mexico leaving their illegal alien children to cope without them here in the U.S.

The show has been ordered to pilot and will be helmed by the original series creators, Christopher Keyser and Amy Lippman. The producers struck an extremely partisan and political note in a recent statement announcing the series.

Of their re-boot they wrote, “Twenty-five years ago, we imagined a story about five kids navigating the world after the untimely death of their parents. Today, stories of families being separated, children having to raise themselves in the wake of their parents’ deportation don’t require any imagination; they are everywhere.”

The network gushed over the plans to Hollywood Reporter saying, “From the moment we heard that Amy and Chris were updating their iconic series with this timely and powerful twist, we knew we had to have this pilot. We’re honored to be the home for next, brilliant iteration of their vision.”

The original series won a Golden Globe in 1996 for Best Drama helped launch the careers of stars Scott Wolf, Matthew Fox, Neve Campbell, Lacey Chabert, and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.