Remember Party of Five? The seminal 90s show gave us five young siblings who struggled to keep their family together after suffering horrible tragedy. The show opens six months after a drunk driver kills their parents. The five are left to fend for themselves with the two brothers and three sisters caring for each other as they grow up facing the challenges of their teenage and young adult years. Party of Five also gave us early looks some actors who later enjoyed successful careers. Matthew Fox went on to lead the mega-hit Lost, while Jennifer Love Hewitt went from being a sixth wheel love interest in Party of Five to star in several Hollywood films and is known worldwide as the Ghost Whisperer (and for being one of the nicest and most beautiful actresses of the last couple of decades). Neve Campbell leads the successful slasher Scream film series. Scream 5 has been greenlit and she’s in it. Lacy Chabert grew up to appear in numerous Hallmark Channel films. Considering that Hallmark can rack up more viewers than CNN now, she’s bigger than Anderson Cooper and on a bigger channel. The 90s Party of Five was a generational star-maker built on a very compelling premise.
Party of Five really didn’t need rebooting. It ran for six seasons, 1994-2000, and told its story. Its kids grew up. But Freeform has decided to reboot it anyway, only without the compelling tragic storyline and with lots and lots of “wokesness.” Check out the trailer. It’s a 30-second lecture on All That’s Bad With America Under Trump. Instead of the kids being orphaned by a lawbreaker who drives drunk, they’re orphaned by a different kind of lawbreaker. Their parents are illegal aliens and deported by the terror group ICE.
Before wokescolds object to the term “illegal alien,” it’s how the federal statutes describe those who enter our country without respecting the legal immigration process that our elected representatives have approved through majority votes. We are a nation of laws, and “illegal alien” is what the laws say.
The parents’ conscious choices in the reboot directly put the kids in their predicament, but that is not the intended message. In the trailer’s opening scene, the family are in a restaurant minding their own business when a mean-faced white, male government ICE agent demands “papers” from the father. In clear but accented English, the father replies “I don’t have any papers.” Cut to a montage as the ICE agents take the parents away in handcuffs, a little girl cries and Trump’s America is cruel and unjust. Cut to a court scene, where another white, male judge says “My hands are tied, the former ruling stands,” and slams the gavel down on their idyllic life in America. The parents must go and it’s all the fault of Trump’s xenophobic patriarchy. Not the parents who chose to break the law.
The parents could be refugees, you say. There’s a system for that. If the parents went outside that system, they knowingly broke the law and put their kids in jeopardy. If they were refugees and worked within the system, they would have proof.
ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is one of our front-line agencies protecting the integrity of our country from the border inward. They protect us from cross-border diseases, ordinary criminals, drug cartels and even terrorism. The likes of AOC (who is Puerto Rican, therefore born a U.S. citizen) and others on the left demonize these civil servants and the agency they work for. ICE is the one government agency liberals single out for canceling, simply because it enforces laws progressives don’t like.
This woke Party of Five sets itself up as a dreadful piece of propaganda in the age of Trump. He got elected promising a border wall to control illegal immigration. The rebooted Party of Five occupies the branding of an iconic 90s show as a skin suit to bash him and American immigration law (which, by the way, is still far more lenient than similar laws in Mexico and many other countries). The kids here appear to be younger than those in the 90s version, to make them more vulnerable and sympathetic. The mother even resembles AOC during her fake cry at a border parking lot (who, again, is Puerto Rican and therefore a natural-born American citizen and not an immigrant of any kind). The kids are obviously cast to put a face on the so-called “Dreamers,” children brought illegally to the United States by parents who made the choice to break the law to enter. Those parents then repeatedly break laws to remain here. They may have lied to obtain work, identification or even committed identity theft to obtain driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers. Illegal entry begets other crimes and leaves the family always vulnerable, due to the choices the adults in the situation make time and time again. These are serious issues deserving of serious treatment. Similar crimes abetted the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and several illegal aliens from Saudi Arabia were among the hijackers. They overstayed visas, making them among the most common types of illegal aliens.
Not all illegal aliens are here to work or intend to become immigrants or “Dreamers.”
If Freeform’s Party of Five gets into any of that, it could be interesting. But it won’t. It also won’t point out that President Barack Obama deported more than Trump has by far. None of these facts serve the left’s narrative that the border is cruel and America is wicked and unjust – despite the fact that there must be some very compelling reasons so many people deliberately break the law to come here and break more laws to stay here. Freeform’s Party of Five will be a Wake of Woke.
A.J. Rice is CEO of Publius PR, a premier communications firm in Washington D.C. Rice is a brand manager, star-whisperer and auteur media influencer, who has produced or promoted Laura Ingraham, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Monica Crowley, Charles Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz, Roger L. Simon, Steve Hilton, Victor Davis Hanson, and many others. Find out more at publiuspr.com.
