#peter paige interview

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Good Trouble: Season 1: First Look {05-27-2018}

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The Fosters EPs Preview Series Finale's Rocky Wedding, Talk Revisiting 'Brallie'

The Fosters invites you to a series-finale wedding next week — but it remains to be seen if Brandon and his fiancée Eliza will actually walk down the aisle.

Picking up one year after the Season 5B finale, the three-night event (airing June 4-6 at 8/7c on Freeform) finds the family gathering for the couple’s destination nuptials in Turks and Caicos. However, the happy affair hits a snag when Callie expresses some concerns about her ex-turned-brother’s bride.

“Weddings are very stressful, and weddings with old loves running around are especially stressful and fraught with danger,” executive producer Peter Paige teases.

The “Brallie” relationship is “where we began,” Paige says of the decision to stir up the pair’s romantic history. “It’s something that a lot of fans have wondered about, whether they’re invested in it coming to fruition or not coming to fruition. It’s something that all the fans have opinions about. And it just felt like it was the right time to understand who they were going to be moving forward.”

One thing’s for certain: Who Brandon and Callie, not to mention the rest of the Foster children, are is not who they were when viewers first met them in the pilot. “Because the characters are older, they feel more mature,” EP Bradley Bredeweg describes. As a result, the show’s swan song has “a different tone and vibe, and the storytelling is a little bit more slow-paced, because it does feel a little bit more mature than the sort of lightning-speed way we told stories in the first five seasons.”

Nowhere is that growth more apparent than in Jude’s storyline in the final episodes, which is one the series can tell now that the pre-teen is a young adult at college. “He’s wrestling with the freedom that one is given when one leaves home and what to do with it,” Paige previews. Adds Bredeweg: “And also the freedom of being a young, gay male in this world and society with social media and sex apps and all of those things. It opens up a lot of different questions and things that you have to maneuver as a young man.”

Meanwhile, with all of their kids out of the house, “the moms are trying to maneuver what that means for them,” Bredeweg shares. “So that’s a rebirth for them, in a way. What do they want to do as a couple in love when the kids are outside of those four walls?”

But Lena and Stef aren’t dealing with a completely empty nest: Their new foster child (played by The Mayor‘s Dallas Young) “is an amazing kid who adds some joy and some tears to our three-episode journey,” Paige reveals. The moms will also have their fair share of wedding stress, courtesy of Eliza’s wealthy, conservative family. “That creates for some very interesting, very challenging [situations],” Paige notes. “Weddings are such a microcosm of norms, of traditions, and in those traditions, there are a lot of things that have been sort of codified: misogyny and ownership and the patriarchy. So what happens when two very, very disparate families come together for one wedding?”

Drama, that’s for sure. And a lot of romantic upheaval for many of the show’s couples. When the Season 5B finale jumped forward in time, Jesus and Emma were still together, and Mariana and Mat had reconciled. But Paige warns, “it’s always a rocky road to paradise. You’ve got to tune in to see who’s still together, and who’s fallen apart, and who gave who crabs.”

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‘The Fosters’ Boss Peter Paige on Callie’s Season 5 Shift and the ‘Edgier’ Freeform

During the first four seasons of “The Fosters”, the ABC Family-turned-Freeform drama garnered much praise from organizations like GLAAD and the Television Critics Association for its inclusive take on the modern American family.

When “The Fosters” debuted, matriarchs (Sherri Saum and Teri Polo) were already raising three teenagers when a troubled juvenile in the foster care system crossed their path. They quickly embraced her and her younger brother, blending their family further. Building the show on this ensemble backdrop allowed executive producers Peter Paige and Bradley Bredeweg to explore what was affecting today’s gay couples raising kids — as well as those kids individually. Early on in the show’s run, the focus was on love triangles, friendship falling outs, and the loss of virginity, as well as the adoption process and a legal battle over a he said/she said rape case.

Just a year later, however, the network entered a re-branding phase, looking for edgier content to solidify the attention of the younger demographic. “The Fosters” helped the newly named Freeform make noise, as the show shined a light on deeper topics that included marriage rights, transitioning, and the justice system.

Variety spoke with Paige about the evolution of “The Fosters,” striking the balance of serious issue storytelling, and what’s to come with the new age of Freeform.

Variety: First, let’s look back over the history of “The Fosters.” Were there any stories you wanted to do early in the run that you couldn’t crack, either because you didn’t feel ready just yet or because the network’s messaging at the time didn’t allow for it?

Peter Paige: Back in the day we had the Jude [Hayden Byerly] and Connor [Gavin MacIntosh] kiss coming in season one. [It was going to be at] the end of season one, but we said, “Let’s earn this a little bit more. Let’s let them get a little bit older”– those kinds of things. And there are always those considerations, but now there are really no stories that the network isn’t up for. With the regime change at the network and with the kids getting older and having more independence, it certainly opened up new avenues into additional story. [But] what’s been really fun in the new regime is that we’ve been able to be edgier and talk a little more frankly about the reality of the teen experience. We were always doing that to some degree, but it opened it up enough to [allow] us to get into the nitty gritty of what it is to be a teenager at this moment in time.

V: Prostitution is an example of what it’s like to be a very specific kind of teenager. How did you come to the decision to bring the show into that dark world?

PP: We’re trying to look really frankly at stuff that’s really happening in the world, and [executive producer] Joanna Johnson went to a seminar from the police department on human trafficking, and she came back and was devastated, and we all started talking about what she had learned. We ended up bringing a couple of women who work in the human trafficking department in Los Angeles into the room, and as soon as we started hearing those stories we knew it was something we wanted to explore. So, we came at it from several different ways and constructed this long game where both Callie [Maia Mitchell] and Stef [Polo] were connected to that world in different ways.

V: The fifth season premiere picks up in the moments after the fourth season ends, with Callie thinking she’s about to go to jail and posing as another girl from the group home Girls United to meet with a pimp — basically sacrificing herself for that girl. It follows in her usual pattern of doing good for others despite the consequences to herself, but how far can you take that, and what do you think it will take for something within her to shift and start valuing herself?

PP: It is a challenge. We can’t just constantly find Callie in worse and worse and worse situations, but it is in her nature that when there is someone in need, other than her, she will come to their aid or defense– even to her own detriment. And the question of this season for Callie is “What if you stopped that? What if you applied that kind of thinking to yourself instead? Who would you be?”

 Stef and Lena [Saum] have been telling her that since the pilot. [She’s] not disposable. But it’s a combination of undervaluing her own life [and] her own well-being and a very strong, very powerful sense of justice. That’s a dangerous remedy. So to some degree it’s a shift that Callie has to make in herself.

V: Is there another character who can help her with that, or is that something she has to figure out on her own?

PP: Stef and Lena [Saum] have been telling her that since the pilot. [She’s] not disposable. But it’s a combination of undervaluing her own life [and] her own well-being and a very strong, very powerful sense of justice. That’s a dangerous remedy. So to some degree it’s a shift that Callie has to make in herself.

V: Speaking of Stef and Lena, where will this season find them?

PP: Stef, as we know from the end of the finale, is in crisis mode trying to save Callie [when we pick back up with her in the season premiere], and Lena is in a fight at the school [to keep the school from turning Charter] that’s as much affecting her life as it is the kids. But they’re [also] engaged in their continuing struggle, which is to nurture their relationship, to parent these five very different kids, and to find their own fulfillment in life. They have challenges coming on every front, and this season we slap another challenge on the moms when Lena’s family comes back to town. Life is big and messy and hard, and getting older is hard, and having parents who are getting older is hard, and it’s all in there.

V: Having kids who are fighting is hard, too, which brings up Brandon [David Lambert] and Jesus [Noah Centineo]. Last seen, Jesus thought his brother was the father of his girlfriend’s baby. How soon will that come to a head, and what are the ramifications going forward?

PP: They reach a pressure point in the premiere, and it’s going to be a great big problem. The tricky thing is, they kind of engage everyone in the family, to some degree, and nobody’s really right or wrong. Jesus is justifiably upset on not being clued into something huge that does impact his life, and Brandon was really trying to do the right thing, but Jesus has a TBI [traumatic brain injury], so his coping skills are diminished. As you’ll see in the premiere, that creates a very challenging circumstance for the brothers and for the family.

V: How do you strike the balance between those heavier stories and more everyday teenage — or even family — issues to tackle, and what is your plan for the tone this season?

PP: The amazing thing about television is it’s never perfect and you’re always learning. It’s like, “OK, next week we’ve got to remember X!” And then you remember X but you forgot Y. But of course that’s the thing about this mess called life, especially in a family like this — this giant, constructed, messy, full of love family — all of the colors of the rainbow are there. There are people having good days [and] there people having bad days. When one kid is winning the spelling bee, another is getting in a van with a pimp. There’s always a way for us to layer in some other lighter, kinder, gentler stuff. And the foundation of the show is the unconditional love, so there’s always hope somewhere in our stories, no matter how bleak they get. The end of the premiere posits a very pointed question about Callie in particular but a little bit sets the stage for a return to family and the more pedestrian questions about what it is to be a teenager and to grow up, as well.

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‘The Fosters’ EP Unpacks That Heart-Stopping Finale And Dishes On Season 5

Can you breathe? Because we can’t. That terrifying season 4 finale cliffhanger of The Fosters has us reaching for a paper bag.

Callie (Maia Mitchell) took Christina’s place and is now stuck calling Diamond’s pimp Russell “Daddy” and counting the seconds until he gets as violent with her as he has with some of his other ladies. All the while, the lifeline Callie threw herself — getting her cop mom Stef to track her phone — went out the window (literally) when she placed it into Russell’s bag and he proceeded to hand the bag off to someone else. Meanwhile, Jesus now knows about Emma’s abortion… and that both Brandon and Mariana were keeping it a secret.

It’s a lot to digest. Thankfully, while one hand holds that paper bag, the other was able to dial executive producer Peter Paige to get some answers about what’s to come in season 5.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Callie’s in quite the pickle! Is there anything you can you tease about how she’ll get out of it?

PETER PAIGE: Look, she’s in an impossible situation, but it’s not the first time she’s faced one of those. She’s a bright and empowered young woman and anything can happen.

EW: Is Diamond going to pick a side? Because I feel like the best way for Callie to get out of this mess would be for Diamond to turn and protect her.

PP: I will say this: Diamond’s allegiances are still in question.

EW: Will she be back for season 5? For how long?

PP: She is in season 5, but I’m not telling you [how long].

EW: Is there a world in which Callie can be in a steady situation and not putting her nose in all kinds of drama?

PP: The situation that Callie gets herself in in the finale becomes a real watershed moment for her and is really life-changing and forces her to look at her life in a way that she just has never quite done. That sets up her journey for all of season 5.

EW: How is Jude going to react to what Callie’s done?

PP: At a certain point, you’ve gotta stop going to the hardware store looking for milk. He knows who his sister is. And he’s got his own fish to fry, quite frankly. By the end of the premiere, Jude has his own fish to fry.

EW: Which kind of fish? More drugs? Sex?

PP: Neither of those things, so I will leave you to wonder. But he does, in fact, put himself engaged in a difficult pursuit. … There’s also some Jude-Noah stuff, the continued development of their relationship.

EW: Talk about the choices made around the Jesus-Emma abortion story.

PP: It was very important to us to do a story where a young woman gets an abortion and feels fine about it and knows it was the right choice for her. The ensuing drama around it is not around that question, it’s around who gets told and when. It’s around the commodification of information and how much it means to us to be included in big decisions. It’s really been about that for us and continues to be. And in the finale, it’s all hitting the fan, but it’s still even in Jesus’ fury; he’s not mad at what Emma did, he’s mad that he wasn’t told.

EW: Do you think there was even a way for her to consult him in the first place?

PP: I don’t. He had a meltdown because there was pepperoni on his pizza. I don’t mean to make light of it — he has a traumatic brain injury, which I think Noah [Centineo] is doing such an extraordinary job of portraying. He was literally not in his right head, and it takes time. And sometimes you never fully get your impulse control back. I just don’t think it was something she could add to his wheelbarrow. It was already pretty heavy and pretty full. I very much understand why she did what she did. And I understand why he’s upset that it happened. That’s the thing about life sometimes: It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned everyone is, people still get hurt sometimes.

EW: Are there going to be further repercussions for Mariana and her Twitter handle?

PP: The dust from that has certainly not settled yet, for sure.

EW: Other than his role in the Jesus storyline, Brandon didn’t have much to do in these last few episodes. It feels a little like he’s on reset mode, so what can we expect from him next season?

PP: I think he is on reset. Last season in the finale, Brandon had the moment of crisis, the moment of looking at his choices and having to decide what kind of person he intends to be, and this season has been that a little for him. He’s been a little retreated, he’s been a little bit pulled into his shell trying to figure out how to navigate the choices he’s made. That feels very true and very real, and season 5 is sort of about him poking his neck out of his shell again.

EW: Is that going to involve figuring out his school situation or the music therapist love interest who was introduced this season?

PP: Both those conversations are very present.

EW: Will the kids ever allow the grownups to leave the Anchor Beach board meeting?

PP: They’re not going to do so particularly willingly.

EW: So no time jump?

PP: Every one of those stories are in a moment of utter and complete crisis, so we are literally coming back three seconds after the finale ends.

EW: Nick’s dad is involved in that school story — are we going to see him return to the show?

PP: At some point we might.

EW: There was no AJ in the finale. Is he still going to be around much in season 5?

PP: We’ll see AJ again. Now that he’s not in a romantic relationship with Callie, we will see less of him for sure, but he’s still present in our world and there’s still stuff to be resolved and questions that we find quite interesting for him.

EW: What’s the state of Callie and Aaron?

PP: Moving ahead, there’s some exploration of, what are Callie and Aaron doing? What are they sniffing around? What is that going to turn into?

EW: Final thoughts on what to expect next season?

PP: Season 5 is a little bit of a reset to our family, our home, and the sort of simpler and brighter and happier times that our family really needs.

The Fosters season 5 kicks off on July 11 at 8 p.m. on Freeform.

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