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1.
Air date: Sep 26, 2021
Lesbian partners Robin Young and Sandy Russo look to start a family by seeking sperm donors; what begins as an unconventional yet warm arrangement with second daughter Ry's donor becomes increasingly fraught as he pursues more rights over her life.
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2.
Air date: Oct 3, 2021
Nine-year-old Ry finds herself at the center of a four-year lawsuit that threatens her family's very existence.
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3.
Air date: Oct 10, 2021
Following a landmark court decision, Ry grapples with her sperm donor's terminal illness and its implications for her future.
Nuclear Family (2021)
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Critic Reviews for Nuclear Family: Season 1
Audience Reviews for Nuclear Family: Season 1
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Sad. I was in tears of anger for Tom and Ry. Clear parental alienation. Robin and Russo CHANGED the plan, not Tom. What they did was controlling and abusive. I was hoping maybe Ry named her son after Tom or something to have some resolve. No. We hear angry Russo say "I hate Tom"at the end of the film. Still jealous and angry after all these years. Where's Cades dad? Who cares, he drinks like her MIA dad she never was able to meet. Russo playing out her own unresolved drama within her own family. Tom as the "big bad wolf" sums up what her two moMsters did to wash Ry's young brain. Sums it up!!!! I was left angry and sad.. The lesbians and their kids against the world. Remember the lesbians that adopted all those kids abused them and ran off a cliff? Reminds me of them!!!!!!!!!! A lifetime emotional cliff dive for these kids. Shame!!!! I wish I never watched it this film. May Tom rest in peace, the true loving parent. These kids missed out!!!
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Outstanding, heartwarming and sad all at once
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Nuclear Family (TV 2021): Mom, mom, and two daughters. Everything is fine; everyone is happy. When the sperm donor wants to be accepted as father to one of the girls, things get messy. Three part documentary made by the daughter creates suspense. Well crafted and fair to all. B+
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What disgusts me about this series, is that the older woman, Sandy Russo, is a waste of space in this planet, you can clearly see the hatred that she has for Tom Steel, and it is WAY beyond a reason of a doubt that her toxicity has spread to her un-biological daughter. Ry Young, if you see this, I feel sorry that you had such a toxic waste of a "parent", who not only deprived you from a relationship with your father, but also manipulated your biological mother Robin Young, into forgoing you into life without your father role. You can clearly see Ry's pain when she confronts her mothers in chapter 3 and how negative and manipulative "Sandy" is, because the reality is, that Ry regrets not having a relationship with her father, and it's too pitiful to see children who yearn to have a relationship with a parent, not have one. Let people reflect on this simple message (and hopefully people will see the clarity of this message) : "Parents divorce each other, not their children". Some parents don't want a relationship with their children, but for the ones that do, shouldn't they be given a chance to do so, without exposing the child in question, to a toxic and villainized version of said parent?
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A riveting look inside a chapter of the documentary filmmakers life. I enjoyed the first several episodes immensely and look forward to the rest. Historical footage of the 70's, 80's, and 90's in NYC and LGBTQ culture is a big part of the story and it was amazing to see, not to mention the actual unfolding of this particular family's struggle for privacy and legitimacy in the eyes of a culture that values genetic biology and heteronormative family structure. It is clear that Ry and Cade are two incredible people, raised by loving, responsible, amazing moms and that the assertion that only one man and one woman makes a family is complete hogwash. Tom seems to be an uncle and family friend who changed his mind about his role and made this family suffer for it causing so much undue stress in a horrible court process. The storytelling, narration, and archival footage of interviews with all involved are excellent and very well done. This is a relevant watch for many reasons, most of all to remind younger generations of LGBTQ people that our roots were extremely hard won, and I am so grateful for this documentary about that struggle- not to mention a validation of this family's commitment to each other. As a woman married to another woman, who intends to make a family and will have to jump through dozens of hoops granted effortlessly to straight couples, it touched me deeply to see their joy and story on a popular platform. Will be tuning in closely to each episode.
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The topics this documentary touches on are relevant and interesting. The content is rich and potential is enormous to get into the main topic and the myriad related topics -- but Nuclear Family falls short. There would be 2 main choices in making a documentary about a situation like this. One option is have the people involved make the documentary; the other is to turn the story over to a skilled documentarian. The former produces a subjective account of What Happened--which, if handled skillfully, could be very powerful. The latter would allow us to view What Happened from multiple perspectives and while not "objective." would allow us to feel empathy for more than one perspective. As is. the former approach that's used seems to cloud the filmmaker's perspective too much--her 2 mothers have too much emotional power over her, even now, as an adult. And yet, at the same time, the film does not really plumb the emotional depths. What Happened--i.e., the "situation" is this. A lesbian does turkey-baster artificial insemination with a friend who, it's agreed, will solely serve as a sperm donor and not have an active part of the child's life. At age 4-5, the child/daughter asks her mother what a "father" is and insists she wants to meet hers. The mother (and the other lesbian mother in the picture who has her own daughter) decide that's cool, she asks the donor if he wants to meet the kid his DNA created 1/2 of, he says yes, and over time---since they all enjoy going on extended vacations and together renting houses where they all stay, numerous times yearly. plus gathering on holidays etc---the biological father develops real fondness and feelings for his biological daughter. When one of the women decides she doesn't like the bio-father's partner and doesn't want him around, the women-couple then decides to cut off the biological father altogether, that he has no say in the matter, and disallow the daughter from seeing the man they introduced into her life--as they readily admit--as being her "father," even tho the daughter has become attached to the bio-father. The mothers become extremely binary about it--drawing a hard line in the sand, now insisting he was never supposed to be part of the child's life and pointing to the original agreement, totally illogically, since the adult women are the ones who encouraged and supported the development of the relationship between this guy and his biological daughter. Suddenly the women do what I've seen others like this couple do---they wage war on the father and on anyone who is not 100% "with them," and see it as their scorched earth duty to "protect" the daughters from the father, and yet the filmmaker never asks her mother what they were so afraid of. To viewers it seems clear like the problem is the one woman in the relationship sees the man as an existential threat to her, that she is losing total control over her partner's daughter's life--and sees the reality of this man as quashing this insular quasi-fantasy-reality the 2 women created together in which no man ever existed in creating the daughter--ferociously backpeddling from the fact that the women themselves encouraged the man to be consistently (and joyfully) part of the daughter's life--and then changed the rules because he now, as father, wants (for example) to introduce the daughter to his great grandmother and rest of his family (of which 50% of the daughter's DNA comes from....like it or not). The 2 women characterize everyone around them as Enemy or Champion---they proudly say to the camera that they determined everyone around them was either For them or Against them. They make the daughter terrified of this man, warning her he means to harm the girl and jeopardize their entire family unit by taking the girl away from her "real family." The women in the documentary admit they would "lie, steal, commit fraud--anything to protect our daughter," but never explain what exactly they are "protecting" the daughter from. Why is he such a threat? Why take such a frenzied hard line? Again, it seems like more an existential threat than anything real. But the filmmaker herself seems to have drunk the Kool Aid long ago. That the one mother is so insecure and threatened by the reality that the girl will actually build a strong loving bond with a MAN, and for that relationship to have nothing to do with this exceedingly fraught and enmeshed-seeming lesbian couple seems to be the nexus of countless people for a decade. The women claim the bio father "muscled his way in" and "insisted on" being part of the girl's life--when, again, this happened at the lesbian couple's own instigation. They fill the 9-1o year old girl with fears that the father or "someone working for him is going to break down the door and drag you away from your mothers and force you to be with this man you don't even know" to the point where this poor child takes on the the mother's obsession, furious antipathy, and fear, and starts drawing violent pictures of her biological father as "The Evil One." In desperation the man says if the lesbian couple keeps withholding the child and won't work together and handle this as friends, work it out sensibly, fairly, and rationally--he will have to go to court. Etc etc etc.... Again, this is a story (or set of stories) with tremendous import and current relevance. But the filmmaker blows it. She is too close to the situation and cannot seem to process what happened--not that I blame her, but if you can't do it, hire someone else to make the film. As is, she is profoundly muddled up and, therefore, so is the film. There is an assertion that the nuclear family was not going to work for the lesbian couple and that there'd be this whole new reality of what a family means---the lesbians both say in interviews early on, but later the couple says they never wanted that, at all. That they did want a nuclear family and this man was a strange and ly presumptuous bizarre intrusion. The mothers are extraordinarily neurotic, histrionic, unselfaware, and antagonistic. They set the child against the man and manipulated her according to their own rage and insecurities. These 2 mothers did a major mind-manipulation job on those kids--brainwashed them--made the child feel she could only be loved by her mother(s) if she said she hated the man, who she had been very positively attached to, for years. The filmmaker doesn't seem to understand what had happened to her at the hands of these women. It seems like it is trying to prove, as one of the women insists: "This case is proof positive that a girl does not NEED a father. She is just FINE without a father," without using this film as an opportunity to explore how much richer they all would have been had the women not been so insecure that they didn't believe there was enough love to go around....which seems ironic, given what they start out claiming about who they are and what they believe in about creating new models and new traditions.
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