Nick Antosca is ingenious at navigating the most surreal yet psychologically intense elements of horror. From Channel Zero to the sublimely bizarre Brand New Cherry Flavor, the television showrunner and producer moved to the gripping true-crime series The Act, proving that he could extract the unnerving yet humanistic elements from dramatic true stories just as well.
Now, Antosca has teamed up with producer Jan Broberg to tell her story in A Friend of the Family, a new limited series from Peacock that tells her family’s larger-than-life story during her adolescent years, when she was abducted on two separate occasions. The limited series uses its lengthy, roughly nine-hour runtime to portray the true events in a way that fleshes out the real people; their decisions might seem incomprehensible without context, but A Friend of the Family humanizes what’s otherwise inconceivable in a way that’s thrilling, disturbing, and unforgettable. Antosca and Broberg spoke with MovieWeb about the limited series and the process of turning the traumas of real life into true-crime art.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
A Friend of the Family is a Dark True-Crime Story
A Friend of the Family follows the Broberg family during the 1970s; they live in a small town in Idaho and attend a Mormon church, and when the new Brechtold family moves into town, they welcome them into the Broberg home. Unfortunately, they welcome patriarch Robert Brechtold a little too much. The series chronicles how the manipulative but pathologically disturbed charmer weasels his way into the naive hearts of the Brobergs, until running off to Mexico with their daughter Jan.
Just how he does this (and is able to do it yet again, even after being caught) has to be seen to be believed, and is better left unspoiled. Suffice it to say, many of the actions and choices of Bob and Mary Ann Broberg are frustrating and confounding, but Antosca’s A Friend of the Family attempts to humanize them and illuminate their motivations in a manner that makes the inconceivable conceivable. The only way the creator was able to do this was through the help of Jan Broberg herself.
“The collaboration process with Jan and with her family has been the heart of this project. It was essential,” said Antosca. “The first thing that we did when we started thinking about telling this story as a series is reach out to Jan, and we had that initial conversation that was three years ago. That conversation has continued until this day, so we couldn’t and wouldn’t have made the show without Jan’s blessing and partnership. She has been incredibly generous. There’s so much information and emotional truth that we put into the show […] but Jan was really essential to telling the human story, one that you can immerse yourself in, empathize with, and relate to.”
Jan Broberg Brings Her Story to Peacock
NBCUniversal
Jan Broberg has of course told her story to several media outlets, and has written about it and participated in a true-crime documentary about it, but being a producer and close collaborator on A Friend of the Family is a different beast altogether. “When you just tell stories and headlines, you don’t get the context, the humanity,” said Broberg. On the other hand, the long-form process of a miniseries and the ability to dramatize multiple years with a star-studded cast (Anna Paquin, Colin Hanks, Jake Lacy, Mckenna Grace) provides the depth needed to depict the events with more context (and thus humanity and comprehension) than any other medium.
“This is a slow burn,” said Broberg, who highlights “that it happened over many, many years,” and appreciates how the epic runtime of A Friend of the Family accurately details her abduction, her abductor, and her family. That accuracy is important for Broberg, who has become an advocate of sorts in the effort to raise awareness of the monsters in our midst. “It’s about a predator, a master manipulator, a sociopathic groomer, who is clearly orchestrating how he’s going to divide and conquer and get to his prey.”
Broberg Felt Safe Making A Friend of the Family
“I think that happens more behind closed doors, in close-knit families, communities, sports teams, USA Gymnastics teams,” added Broberg, who is by now deeply cognizant of all the ways that wolves hide in sheep’s clothing. Her kidnapper, Robert Brechtold, was the titular friend of the family, a charming man (brilliantly played by Lacy) who was loved by all.
“Of course, people don’t see it if it’s someone they already trust. They already think they have the answer,” said Broberg. Because of that presumptuousness people so often have, and the finger-wagging they frequently do at her family for their decisions, Broberg was surprised by how open and caring Antosca and his crew were.
“I felt cared for,” said Broberg. “It was like, ‘Oh, you’re going to care for my story. You’re going to literally listen to my family members, and you know how they’re not to blame.’” Instead of blaming her family, who survived the traumas and became stronger together, A Friend of the Family humanizes them and understands the real villain here. “There’s one bad guy, and that predator knows what they are doing, building that trust slowly over time. It’s just really nefarious, and yet it’s very common.”
A Friend of the Family is Antosca’s Scariest Story Yet
Antosca certainly recognized the evil lurking in the heart of Broberg’s story; for an artist who has brought to life some grotesque monsters on his shows, the kidnapper Robert Brechtold may be one of the most unsettling. Antosca has managed to bring the disturbing psychological horror of his previous works into a completely different context with A Friend of the Family, a devastating, often frustrating account of manipulation and obsession.
“You know, the stories that I tell are character-driven horror stories, and this is the scariest story that I’ve ever been involved in telling,” said Antosca. He continued:
A Friend of the Family is an astounding, sometimes difficult-to-watch epic about the awfulness lingering in the dark ambiance of the American Dream. It can be confounding, extremely dark, and very intense, but speaking with Jan Broberg (and seeing her in the introduction to the series) reminds one that there is hope — she made it. “Don’t quit watching till you get to the end,” said Broberg. “The story ends happily.”
It is so powerful. It is terrifying, and maddening, and haunting, but the closer you get to it, the more you think about it, the more you understand that it is so relatable and human. You see how the real people involved in it, who are so similar to all of us, that the heat just got turned up one degree by one degree by one degree, and you see how you could get into a situation where you’ve made all these little concessions and all these things, and then you find yourself saying, “Oh my god, how did I get here? How did I get into this situation?”
A co-production of Eat the Cat, Universal Content Productions, and Top Knot Films, A Friend of the Family will premiere on Thursday, October 6th with four episodes on Peacock, and the remaining five episodes will drop weekly on Thursdays through November 10th.
