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Get ready for a ‘Party of Five’ remake that puts immigration — and family separation — front and center

Freeform has ordered 10 episodes of the updated family drama, in which the parents aren't dead, but have been deported to Mexico, leaving their five children behind.

Freeform's "Party of Five" stars  Niko Guardado as Beto Acosta, Brandon Larracuente as Emilio Acosta, Elle Paris Legaspi as Valentina Acosta, and Emily Tosta as Lucia Acosta, four of the five siblings left behind to fend for themselves -- and care for a baby -- as their parents are deported in a Freeform reboot of the 1994-2000 family drama on Fox.
Freeform's "Party of Five" stars Niko Guardado as Beto Acosta, Brandon Larracuente as Emilio Acosta, Elle Paris Legaspi as Valentina Acosta, and Emily Tosta as Lucia Acosta, four of the five siblings left behind to fend for themselves -- and care for a baby -- as their parents are deported in a Freeform reboot of the 1994-2000 family drama on Fox.Read moreVu Ong/Freeform

PASADENA, Calif. — Reporters at the Television Critics Association’s winter meetings were given a first look Tuesday at a single scene from the Freeform-ordered reboot of Party of Five, and, frankly, it was a heartbreaker.

I suppose you could say the same thing about the 1994-2000 original Fox drama in which the five Salinger children were orphaned, but dead parents are, alas, nothing new on television. (Especially mothers.)

By making the new show about five siblings named Acosta whose parents are deported to Mexico, the show is wading into the middle of an emotional, divisive issue while also setting up a situation in which the parents, too, are grieving. And for anyone who’s not become hardened to the stories and pictures of families being separated at our southern border, or divided by deportations, the sight of the children’s mother clinging to her youngest, still an infant, until the last possible moment, is not likely to be easily forgotten.

On the other hand, it’s only one scene in a show that doesn’t yet have a premiere date.

For Amy Lippman, who created both the original and the new series with Christopher Keyser, news stories of family separations offered a reason to join the tide of TV remakes.

“Chris and I had lots of opportunities over the years to sort of revisit the story,” she told reporters. “As we began to see what the political climate of the world is these days, and we began to see stories like this on the front page of every newspaper, we began to realize that what we had sort of imagined, which was a family of orphans 25 years ago, had sort of transmogrified into families of kids who are living without their parents in a very real way.”

Separation, rather than death, offered dramatic opportunities as well.

“It’s real. It’s happening every day,” Lipmann said. Plus, in the original Party of Five, “those dead parents stayed dead for six years, and the fact of that never changed. And one of the things that sort of excites us about doing the show now is that the parents are a factor in it. They are not present, but they are dealing with issues of ‘how do we try to parent our kids from a distance?’ ”

Niko Guardado, Brandon Larracuente, Elle Paris Legaspi, and Emily Tosta star as the four oldest siblings (the baby wasn’t present at Tuesday’s news conference, and my guess is that he or she will have been recast by the time the series premieres, given how fast babies grow).

In a nod to fans of the original, there is a scene in the pilot, Lipmann said, that was in the Party of Five pilot 25 years ago and that was changed only slightly. “I think there is enough for our fans of long ago to see echoes of the original series.”

Netflix’s One Day at a Time, a reimagining of the Norman Lear series that starred Bonnie Franklin, also features a Latino family — three generations of Cuban Americans, with Justina Machado and Rita Moreno in the lead — and also has touched on immigration concerns.

Another Freeform show, The Bold Type, has tackled the issue through the story of a Muslim character.

And the CW’s new reboot, Roswell, New Mexico, has returned its lead character, Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) to her Latina roots -- the character’s ethnicity was changed from the Melinda Metz novels in the old WB/UPN Roswell -- and made her father, Arturo (Carlos Compean), an undocumented immigrant.

But however much immigration issues are in the news or on TV shows, not all viewers will necessarily appreciate the Acostas' plight as the undocumented parents of four U.S. citizens. (They brought their oldest with them from Mexico when he was too young to remember, and Keyser described him as a “DACA kid,” referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.)

"When we showed the pilot to an audience like, a test audience, one of the things that came up is people said, ‘Why didn’t the father pursue citizenship when he first came to the country illegally?’ " Lipmann said.

“There is no path to citizenship when you are illegal, and … I was a little horrified that people didn’t know that, and I was also sort of excited by an opportunity to tell people, ‘This is what it’s like.’ ”