"We all know families have secrets," says Kyle Chandler, who plays second son John, the family rock who has seemingly spent his life holding the clan together while eldest son Danny screws up, youngest son Kevin goofs off and only daughter Meg treads her own path. "I bet if I said to you now, think of three dark secrets in your family, suddenly you'd have six - that's the way families work ... "
Produced by the creators of legal thriller Damages, Bloodline is expert in its mix of complex characterisation and killer twists and should be just the ticket for any Netflixers seeking a dark drama binge.
"After we'd finished Damages we realised we really wanted to approach the subject of family," says Todd Kessler, who co-wrote the show with brother Glenn and their long-time writing partner Daniel Zelman. "We wanted to tell of a straight-ahead family with a heightened situation which allowed us to take a step back and really go very deep into relationships and interpersonal dynamics."
Indeed, without giving too much away, what makes the series so compelling is the contrast between the public life the family present to hotel guests and the private pain they're desperately trying to hide.
Surprisingly perhaps, the Kesslers and Zelman drew inspiration for the series not from other TV dramas but from 1980s Hollywood potboilers such as Body Heat and Fatal Attraction.
"In the beginning of those movies, life is good. You know Glenn Close and Michael Douglas' characters [in Fatal Attraction] just kind of meet at a party and you have no idea what's coming. We were aiming for [that trajectory]. We want you to get to know the characters first. We're going to take you on a hell of a ride but at the same time we want you to draw your own conclusions."
It helps that they've assembled an impressive cast to tell their tale. The Rayburn parents, sweetly vague Sally and guitar-strumming Robert, are played by Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard, who bring to the roles a shared history, honed in films ranging from Raggedy Man to Crimes of the Heart. "When we set out to sell the show we were describing the characters and we'd get to Robert and Sally and always say 'think Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard'. So to then get them is just extraordinary," Kessler admits.
Chandler, who first made his name on TV with his acclaimed turn as coach Eric Taylor in Friday Night Lights before forging a successful movie career with roles in The Wolf of Wall Street, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, agreed to sign on as John, because the part of the seemingly straightforward family man seemed like "a lot of fun ... his decentness and his obligations to the world are actually a tremendous burden".
Meanwhile, the role of estranged eldest son Danny, a troubled drifter who is both terrifying and oddly vulnerable, went to Ben Mendelsohn, the Australian actor who has cornered the market in screen sociopaths through his work in films such as Animal Kingdom and Starred Up."He was the only actor we met with," says Kessler. "We knew he'd be able to give you the sense of wild animal within."
Another of the show's trump cards is its location, in keeping with the trend for top crime dramas to concentrate as much on a sense of place as the story they're telling - think True Detective's soupy Louisiana bayou, the frozen vistas of Fortitude, even Broadchurch's endless honey-coloured beach. The long chain of islands at the tip of Florida known as the Florida Keys has always been a favourite locale for thrillers - from the 1948 Bogart/Bacall film noir classic Key Largo to the crime novels of Carl Hiaasen and Tom Corcoran - and Bloodline's atmosphere thrives off their murkily tropical beauty and alien remoteness.
"The Keys are so picture-postcard beautiful but at the same time you're down in the mangrove [swamps] environment so it also stinks," says Mendelsohn. "They call alcoholism 'the Keys disease' and you can see that ... there's a range of people down here and definitely more than one person who's come to the Florida Keys to be on the lam."
- Independent
