Relatable Family Chaos Prevails In ‘Dinner With The Parents’

Jon Beckerman is bracing himself for his family’s critique of his new show.

“They haven’t seen it yet, but they’ll be letting me know soon,” he says.

He’s talking about his new series entitled Dinner with the Parents. Beckerman created the show and serves as showrunner on the series.

But, in all honesty, he says that he’s not that concerned about his family’s reaction. “I'm not too worried about it, but there are certain little bits of family lingo and details that I think they'll be delighted to see. That's what I'm hoping anyway.”

In Dinner with the Parents, every Friday evening, the closely-knit Langers get together for a meal, but even with the best intentions, things always seem to devolve into chaos.

Based on the U.K. series, Friday Night Dinner, this version features Michaela Watkins and Dan Bakkedahl as parents Jane and Harvey, with Henry Hall and Daniel Thrasher playing brothers David and Greg. The series also stars Carol Kane as Nana and Jon Glaser as neighbor Donnie.

Guest stars this season include Rob Delaney, Christine Adams, and Mircea Monroe.

As for using his family as inspiration, Beckerman begins with when he was asked to develop the series as he says, “I watched a couple of episodes of Friday Night Dinner and I said to myself, ‘this is my family.’ The whole environment felt very familiar to me.”

As such, Beckerman didn’t try to replicate the characters from the U.K. version, but rather he says that he repurposed the characters to be more like his own family.

“They're all named after us,” he says. “ Like the character David, for example, well, my middle name is David, and my brother’s’ middle name is Greg, so there’s that as well.”

He goes on to say, “My brother and I are two and a half years apart, I’m older, he’s younger, and we know exactly how to push each other's buttons and get each other's goat and that's been going on for decades now.”

However, Beckerman is clear that, “The storylines are less about things that actually happened to me and my family, because they are obviously very heightened, ridiculous stories, but there's germs of truth in them that I hope makes them feel relatable.”

Given that the series is an American reimagining of a successful British show, Beckerman is aware that it might be hard to convince fans of that show to tune into this version.

However, he says, “Well, I think that most people here in the U.S. will be seeing this for first time, so they'll be judging it on its own merits rather than comparing it with something that they already you know.”

Beckerman says that he’s ‘heartened’ by the fact that the American version of The Office was a hit.

“That series got off to a bit of a rough start in some ways, because it was being compared to the British Office. But, over time, people just accepted it as its own thing and fell in love with it. I myself remember being highly skeptical and rolling my eyes when I first saw it and then by the time I had watched a couple of episodes I was just like, ‘you know, there’s the U.K. Office and this is another show that, in my opinion, is equally great.’”

To this end, Beckerman and his creative team really focused on making Dinner with the Parents it’s own entity, one with a with a rapid fire rhythm.

“We set out to make a fast paced show that’s kind of relentless. So, I’d rather hear that someone had to rewind and watch something again rather than that it lagged at any point,” says Beckerman.

He adds, “I think the mark of a successful farce is essentially that the story keeps accelerating and the stakes keep ratcheting up as you make your way through the episodes, so what we set out to do.”

Coming from years of writing, having co-created the hit series Ed, which ran for four seasons, and having worked with David Letterman for years, Beckerman says that he brings some knowledge from those jobs to this series.

“This is a very different sort of show from either of those, but from Letterman, I learned how to write things that not only made me laugh, but would make whatever random group of tourists and people who were brought into the audience that day in the theater laugh. I'm really glad to have had the experience of writing for live audiences for many years. I feel like it informs the way I write jokes and dialogue.”

From his work on Ed, Beckerman says, “I wrote so many episodes of that show that I just feel like it was a bootcamp for learning different steps in the process of writing. I learned how to write scenes, I learned how to write stories, and, most importantly, I learned how to edit, because it's incredible what happens in post-production. I'm not sure that people realize that after everything is shot, you discover all sorts of things when you look at the cuts, and using all of that in just the right way is so important in putting an episode together.”

One thing that was very surprising in working on Dinner with the Parents, says Beckerman, as he laughs a bit, was that, “in the process of making the show we had a stunt coordinator and actual stunt men on set what felt like all the time. I think this differentiates our show from other half-hour comedies on the air in that there's a lot of big physical comedy. And, personally, I don't think that big physical stunts should be left to action movies, so I love that we managed to execute some of our fights and accidents and mishaps in these ways. I love that stuff.”

Beckerman is aware that some viewers might be a bit hesitant to watch what they may think is just another series about a mixed-up family, to which he says, “For me, the pleasure of watching a show about a dysfunctional family like this is twofold; first of all, you feel less alone. It might make you think, ‘maybe my family isn't so bad.’ And then secondly, what I love about this show is that even though things go horribly wrong every week, this family always comes back the following Friday to do it all again, and that tells me that their bond is strong enough to override all of these other terrible things that happen.”

With all of this in mind, Beckerman sums up the series with the thought that, “This family might be described as a dysfunctional family, but in a way I think they are incredibly functional. To me, a real dysfunctional family is one in which people harbor deep seeded resentments and they never work through anything. That’s not who the Langers are. They're people who love each other very much but just get in each other’s way sometimes. But, they always work things out, and that’s the most important thing. That’s what makes them such an interesting family.”

The first four episodes of ‘Dinner with the Parents’ are available to stream exclusively on Amazon Freevee now. Two additional episodes will be available each Thursday until the finale on May 9^th.