How ‘A Friend of the Family’ Turns a Horrific Abduction Saga Into Something Beyond True Crime (2024)

On his first day of filming A Friend of the Family, Peaco*ck’s upcoming true-crime limited series, Jake Lacy found a letter in his trailer. It was written by Jan Broberg, one of the series’s producers and also one of its real-life subjects. The note described in generous detail the character he was set to play, as she remembered him from childhood: charming, warm, funny, a wonderful storyteller, able to cry at the drop of a hat. This was his superpower, she wrote, that disguised his monstrous nature. The letter then concluded by giving Lacy a kind of blessing: “She was like, ‘Go for it,’” Lacy recalls. “‘Don’t second-guess this.’”

Lacy plays Robert “B” Berchtold, a seemingly loving husband, father, and respected business owner in ’70s Idaho. As previously chronicled in the Netflix documentary Abducted in Plain Sight, Berchtold repeatedly sexually assaulted his underage neighbor Jan and kidnapped her on two separate occasions, when she was 12 and 14 years old—and embroiled her parents in his abusive manipulations, prolonging his bizarre hold on the family. (After pleading guilty to felony kidnapping, he ultimately served only 10 days in prison, according to the documentary. He died by suicide in 2005.)

When laid out in detail, the incredibly disturbing yearslong saga would surely seem too strange for fiction; that the adult Jan would decades later involve herself in the TV version might sound even more outlandish. But the 60-year-old actor, producer, and activist is determined to help others recover from, or altogether avoid, the kind of singular trauma her family experienced. “I’ve had a lot of opportunities to tell my story, and I keep telling it over and over again because I want to help people see it before it’s too late,” Jan says now. “This is the most common kind of abuse. It’s not a scary stranger. It’s someone you know, someone you often love and usually trust. We don’t talk about it enough.”

A Friend of the Family, then, arrives with a mission. Created by Nick Antosca, known for Hulu’s limited series The Act and Candy, the nine-episode drama (premiering October 6) thoroughly examines each beat in the horrific dance between Berchtold and the Broberg family, pushing beyond the time and formal constraints of the previous 90-minute documentary. The cast and crew had constant access to not just Jan, who continues to visit the set often (the series remains in production), but also her mother, Mary Ann, and her sisters Susan and Karen. If dramatic license has become something of a hot topic in recent streaming true-crime projects, here’s one series where the only liberties taken are in what can’t get squeezed in. “We had so much to work with in terms of the actual facts,” Antosca says. “The first episode, which takes place mostly on a single day, is almost exactly accurate—[the events] happened in nearly exactly that order on that day.”

Yet the show is hardly a dutiful retelling. There’s real aesthetic ambition here, as helmed by director and executive producer Eliza Hittman, and a nuanced interest in the psychology of its main characters. “I knew going in that the actors would have their own emotional journey—they’d take their own understanding,” Jan says. “They’re not trying to mimic my family.” She wrote letters to the entire main cast, in fact, to assure them she wouldn’t stand in the way of their choices or interpretation, discomfiting as they may get: “I wanted them to have the permission to bring what they have to offer. And I also wanted them to know that all of the characters—even Berchtold—are full human beings.”

Jan provided the production with “boxes and boxes of memories,” Antosca says. Along with Hittman and the actors, he had access to family albums and the childhood diaries of the Broberg sisters. Jan kept her clothing from that period, including dresses featured on the show for the younger and older versions of the character—played by Hendrix Yancey and Mckenna Grace, respectively.

Hittman’s first episode unfurls as an eerie family drama curdling with dread, and she took that atmosphere straight out of the family artifacts. “There are so many small family moments that we got to see and experience—birthday parties, churches, family vacations,” the director says. “But in looking at the photos, we also felt a collective sense of sadness going through them, feeling that underlying tension of what was happening in the background.”

This is Hittman’s first TV gig as an executive producer, and she brings her textured feel for cinematic tension—previously seen in her queer thriller Beach Rats and abortion-access odyssey Never Rarely Sometimes Always—to these true events. She and Antosca found alignment in their cultural touchstones: ’70s films like Badlands and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, tinkering with the classical realism of the period’s films. Her camera moves with intense subjectivity, placing us right alongside Jan, Mary Ann (played by Anna Paquin), even Berchtold. The narrative proceeds like a slow-burn thriller while digging under your skin from moment one. “It’s so important to show the fullness of their lives—you have to show the 90-95% of the time when things were normal,” Antosca says. “It’s a psychological horror story—and it is also a story of survival, a story of a family who goes through something unimaginable and survives and heals and forgives.”

According to the advocacy organization RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), 93% of child victims of sexual abuse know their perpetrator. This is a point Jan makes repeatedly over our conversation: The closeness she felt to Berchtold as a child and teenager made her particularly vulnerable to his tactics, even once she knew what he was capable of.

Lacy’s smiley, terrifying performance centers the series, as A Friend of the Family explores how he came to control the entire Broberg family. If you thought The White Lotus undid the actor’s nice-guy screen persona, well, this goes several steps further. “We needed somebody who had that kind of charisma and charm and boyish magnetism, because you had to understand how the family fell under his spell,” Antosca says.

Giving Berchtold dimension helps explain the harrowing rabbit hole the Broberg family falls down, without judgment or finger-pointing. For Jan, redirecting the conversation that came out of the documentary—mainly around her parents, who both developed intimate relationships with Berchtold—was essential. “There was so much misunderstanding—such a missing conversation on grooming, that everybody was a victim and no one in my family was to blame,” Jan says. “I wanted my parents to be understood, because shaming the people in the orbit of the child that actually gets abused is just the worst thing you can do.” Jan found that Paquin brought “huge” insights to the role of her mother, while Colin Hanks, who plays her late father, Bob—he passed away in 2018—tapped her for personal details like music tastes. (She gave Hanks a playlist.)

It’s all in service of a knotty, unsettling, suspenseful new take on a grisly story that’s been making headlines for years. The events have never been explored in this much depth or breadth, though—not to mention with this level of artistic interpretation. Those involved here are as serious about getting the details precisely right as they are honoring the characters’ complexity and contradictions.

In our Zoom interview, Jan Broberg and Nick Antosca are seated side by side in the same room, cracking jokes while candidly discussing their process. They’re on location, about to head back to set, arm in arm. This is the way of A Friend of the Family: creator and subject, in the weeds, working together. “It was really nice not to be left out,” Jan says. “I felt like I had a say.”

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