My family up a tree: Love My Way, Please Like Me and the gift of messy families

by Georgia Imfeld

“It’s not really a normal tree my family tree. It’s kind of two trees; two trees stuck together…”

As I read those words, I hear them spoken in my head by the sweet, little voice of Lou, the angelic eight-year-old from Love My Way, Foxtel’s critically acclaimed social realism drama that follows Lou, her separated parents, and their extended family unit. Lou is the daughter of thirty-somethings Frankie Paige (played by Claudia Karvan, also one of the show’s creators) and Charlie Jackson (Dan Wyllie). Their parents, partners, and siblings make up the foliage of their family tree. Amongst the leaves sits Charlie’s brother Tom (Brendan Cowell), with whom Frankie shares a house and occasionally a bed, Charlie’s wife Julia (Asher Keddie), grandparents on either side, and various partners and friends of the family. It’s been ten years since the show’s finale but for many, the stories and voices of Lou, and the family that surrounds her, echo in our minds and in the family trees we’ve seen on television since.

Love My Way is a portrait of an extended, blended family. In the seventh episode of the first season, “My Family Up A Tree”, Lou explains the rambling web of connections from her perspective, in a show-and-tell presentation to her class. Theirs is a sprawling, gnarly family tree; knotted and kinked, messy and misshapen. Lou sits at the centre, holding them all together, making sense of them all. This kind of family structure ­­­­­— “two trees stuck together” — ­­­has long been a reality for many Australian families but one seldom represented on our screens, especially in a positive light. This idea of the amicable split, and the strengths and strains that underpin it, sits at the core of Love My Way.

The show came at a time when we were ready to see a warts-and-all depiction of family and adulthood. The love these people have for one another is unconditional and extremely complicated. Ex-partners and in-laws have keys to each other’s houses, they get together for dinner parties, parenting responsibilities are shared, they drink together, laugh together, help each other out, piss each other off. These characters aren’t always likeable, but they’re always believable.

Since the show’s finale in 2007, we’ve seen other honest depictions of contemporary family life in popular shows like Foxtel’s Tangle (2009) and Channel Ten’s Offspring (2010). Though these shows differ tonally, the structure of each is based on an overgrown and messy (or tangled, as it were) family tree. Both families grow larger and more complicated as the seasons go on. It seems to be the case for Australian audiences, the messier the better.

Love My Way’s depiction of family combines the ideas of building your own family from the people you love, and making the most of the one’s you’re stuck with, an idea echoed on our screens most recently in ABC’s Please Like Me. Josh (Josh Thomas) sits at the trunk of this family tree, from him sprout branches of his long-term friend and house mate Tom (Tom Ward), ex-girlfriend of both Josh and Tom, Claire (Caitlyn Stacey), his divorced parents, Rose (Debra Lawrance) and Allan (David Roberts), Rose’s housemate whom she befriended in a psych ward, Hannah (Hannah Gadsby), his Dad’s new wife May (Renee Lim) and his new baby sister.

Once again, we see the modern family tree as far-reaching and ever-expanding; friendship, forgiveness, separation, and mental illness enrich soil from which it grows, adding colour to its leaves and causing its branches to kink and bend. Josh’s family tree — a group of misfits made up of blood relatives and friends — follows in the footsteps of Love My Way, Tangle, and Offspring, reminding us that blood may be thicker than water, but we need both to survive.

We often turn to television for escapism. There’s no denying the value in the shows that give us the chance to experience a life unlike our own, or the opportunity to not have to think. Shows like Love My Way and Please Like Me reveal the value of turning to television and seeing people like us, living lives like ours; complicated, messy, and sometimes a bit shit. We’re not escaping our world so much as seeing it from above, hopefully coming to understand it a bit better. The success of Love My Way, and the fondness we felt for the Jackson-Paige clan, suggests that we’d rather see a family like theirs than a ‘normal family tree’, whatever that may be. We love our gnarly family trees. Seeing them on our screens reminds us that the ugliness of our own family trees are normal. The sprawling and knotted family trees we see on television make us feel better about the bends and bumps of our own branches. Loving them helps us love our own.

“It’s not really a normal tree my family tree… But it’s still really cool and tall and green…It has an old trunk and some new leaves. And it’s branches go off in all directions, and some tangle round again. But my family’s a good tree because it just grows and grows and grows and sometimes the leaves fall off but sometimes news ones sprout. And I love it, I love all of it. My family up a tree.“