ABC Family’s “The Fosters” is one of the most multicultural shows on TV, but its creators tell The Post that they’re just trying to better depict how society has changed.
“We are living in a culture completely obsessed with its own reflection, and the mirror is the 52-inch plasma in all of our living rooms,” says Peter Paige, who, with Bradley Bredeweg, co-created the series. “When you don’t find yourself there, you really feel culturally invisible.”
The series, which returns for a second season at 9 p.m. Monday, chronicles the lives of a married lesbian couple — biracial Lena (Sherri Saum) and Caucasian Stef (Teri Polo) — as they raise five children of various racial and ethnic backgrounds and provenances (biological and adopted). One 13-year-old is even struggling with the reality that he may be gay.
Paige is best known for playing campy gay club-hopper Emmett Honeycutt on Showtime’s sexually explicit 2000s drama “Queer as Folk.” He says that show and the more family-friendly “The Fosters” actually have much in common, despite their radically different themes.
“What I used to say about ‘Queer as Folk’ is: They came for the queer, they stayed for the folk. ‘The Fosters’ is the same formula,” says Paige. “They both are very, very much about a normalizing, if you will, of the exotic. They came to see something they’d never seen before, to be titillated — but stayed because they recognized themselves.”
“The Fosters” also has the backing of a surprising executive producer: “American Idol” judge Jennifer Lopez. “Her favorite aunt was a lesbian [who] has passed and never got to see a vision of this kind of family realized in her own life,” Paige says. “I think Jennifer feels the show is a tribute to this woman she loved so much.”
The show has a decent audience (an average of 1.7 million viewers in Season 1), but that appreciation wasn’t always a given.
In 2012 — before the pilot was even filmed, Paige says — the antigay group One Million Moms urged ABC Family to drop the series. The group has continued to call the show “unacceptable” and “offensive,” but Bredeweg says neither the network nor the showrunners have been swayed by criticism.
“We just try not to take that stuff in anymore; it doesn’t really have an impact on us,” he says. However, he adds that he and Paige are moved when they see a more positive shift from viewers who once may have aligned themselves with that ideology.
Bredeweg says he recently received a Facebook message from someone he describes as a “conservative, Republican, religious woman” who watched the show for the first time. “I believe her exact words were, ‘I had a lot of hatred in my heart for the homosexual community, and you’ve changed my mind because of your series,’ ” he relates. “That really has an impact.”