Everyone has secrets, but some, like the family portrayed in the new drama web series FAMILY PROBLEMS, have secrets that are darker than most. The series, written, directed and created by Seth Chitwood, debuted on Feb. 17th, and airs each Sunday night at 9:00 Eastern, with twelve episodes set for this season, and plans for three seasons total.
The series tells the story of the Solloway family, a typical, closely knit American family, with their own set of hopes, dreams, has the same problems that every normal family has, except one: a dead body that the family buried years ago. The Solloways thought that their past would be buried with it, but instead, their lives get turned upside down forever when their dark secrets are finally brought to light.
The show stars Theresa Chiasson as Molly Solloway, the family’s matriarch and wife to husband Henry (Peter Morse), both of whom are parents of daughter Missy (Sarah Alfano) and son Connor (Alex Dhima). The cast also includes Natasha Hatalsky as Detective Christina Elliot, Stacey Forbes-Iwanicki as Detective Elizabeth Hunt, John Samela as Chief Alexander Hudson, and Vicky Lynch as Jennifer Grady, a cast that is so close, Chitwood considers them to be, in his words, “a real family.”
The series, which was developed in July of last year, with a test pilot filmed in August, and full production beginning that October, has a relatively small cast, compared to Chitwood’s other series, THE DREAMER and RED CIRCLES, and it was his experience with those shows that helped Chitwood in making FAMILY PROBLEMS. “…I felt like I kind of knew exactly what to do this time to make this series work. I felt like I really had the whole production down because I’ve already learned from every possible mistake.”
The show’s production process was incredibly extensive, especially during pre-production, from the cast spending four days on table reads for each script, to a former homicide officer training Hatalsky and Forbes-Iwanicki in playing their roles as detectives, from staging a mock crime scene, to proper gun control and house cleaning. The cast worked fourteen hour days over ten days, with five days for the present-day family scenes, three days set aside for the series’ flashback sequences, and one day for the interrogation sequences set in the future.
Chitwood, a film studies major at Rhode Island College, and an avid observer of movies and TV, cites many people who inspire him to create his shows, from the legendary director Stanley Kubrick, to TV producers David E. Kelley (L.A. LAW, PICKET FENCES, ALLY MCBEAL), Shonda Rhimes (GREY’S ANATOMY, SCANDAL), and Mark Frost (who produced the cult classic TWIN PEAKS). Yet, Chitwood feels that his greatest inspiration comes from those who know him best: “Both of my parents were former television critics who wrote a column called On2Night. We would get all the pilots in the mail when I was a kid. They were also my biggest support system when it came to creating shows. My father was the one I would run a few ideas by, to see what he thought audiences would think from a critical standpoint.”
FAMILY PROBLEMS, says Chitwood, is unique because of its narrative, a narrative set in the past, present and future, making for a whodunit mystery web series unlike any other: “Everyone has a secret, and nothing is what it seems, which is close to life: we really don’t know what is truly happening in our neighbors houses. Families have problems, maybe not all as extreme as this one, but it’s how they deal with them. Most families deal with drama, but what makes a family strong is how they recover. I think audiences will appreciate not only the mystery part, but also how this family copes.”
ON THE WEB: www.angelwoodpictures.com/familyproblems
FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/familyproblemstheseries
YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/familyproblems1425
TWITTER: www.twitter.com/FamilyProblems1