Devil In The Family: The Fall Of Ruby Franke is a three-part docuseries, directed by Olly Lambert, documents the 2023 case in Utah where Ruby Franke, a popular parenting vlogger, along with Jodi Hildebrandt, her therapist, were both arrested for abusing Franke’s four youngest children. This happened after one of Franke’s six kids, her 12-year-old son, managed to escape Hildebrandt’s house, where Franke and Hildebrandt were holding them captive, and go to a neighbor’s house. He looked emaciated and had signs that he was restrained for long periods of time.
Opening Shot: A child whose face is blurred out is seen on a doorbell camera; he rings the bell and starts to walk away when it’s not answered at first. When someone does come to the door, the boy asks the house’s resident to drive him to the local police station, “for personal reasons.”
The Gist: The docuseries has copious footage of Franke, who always wanted to be the Mormon model of the “perfect mother,” according to her ex-husband Kevin. Kevin is interviewed by Lambert, as are the Frankes’ two oldest children, Shari and Chad. Now adults, Shari and Chad were featured prominently in Franke’s videos after she started posting them in 2015, when the two of them were preteens. The four youngest Franke children’s faces and identities are obscured throughout the series. Neighbors and friends of Franke were also interviewed, including the friend who recommended Hildebrandt to Ruby Franke when Chad became reluctant to participate in Franke’s videos.
The footage of Franke is from unedited outtakes of the videos that garnered millions of views and subscribers on YouTube; many of them show Ruby Franke yelling at her children to be quiet while she records, or chastizing them for not participating the way she wanted. Her following started dropping after a 2020 video where Chad talks about being punished for his surly attitude; he was banished from his room and slept on a beanbag in a den for seven months. That’s when the online backlash began. But Franke continued to follow Hildebrandt’s advice and administer other abusive forms of punishment.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Devil In The Family: The Fall Of Ruby Franke is reminiscent of An Update On Our Family, which was also about parenting vloggers whose lives were not as hunky dory as they depicted in their YouTube videos.
Our Take: The most telling moment in the first episode of Devil In The Family comes right at the beginning, when Shari Franke tells Lambert, “What Ruby has done… It just crossed a line of abusive to just… psychotic and downright evil.” Why it’s telling is that she isn’t identified as Shari until a few minutes later, and she refers to her mother by her first name. For all we know, this is a neighbor or some other observer. But when we realized that Ruby Franke’s oldest child saying this, it snapped us to attention.
The docuseries could so easily slide into the cliches we’ve seen lately, during docuseries like Scamanda or the aforementioned An Update On Our Family, both of which are about religious vloggers or bloggers who have shown sociopathic, narccisistic behavior. But the case of Ruby Franke is especially egregious because of just how much her behind-the-scenes life looked compeltely different than thre “real” and “cute” family things she put on YouTube.
The participation of Kevin, Shari and Chad helps. Kevin, who was always a reluctant participant in the videos, gives his perspective of just how determined Ruby was to make their lives look happy on video, and he seemed to be powerless to keep her from being verbally abusive, and eventually physically abusive, to their children. We get Chad’s perspective of being one of the first objects of his mother’s ire — he was also sent to a survival camp and was threatened to be sent to military camp — simply because he was a teenager who didn’t want to be on camera anymore. But when he was younger, videos with his goofy antics often drew the most views, so Ruby was desperate to keep him on camera, even if he didn’t want to be.
By the time the first episode is over, we don’t get too deeply into how Franke started to buy into Hildebrandt’s extreme methods of discipline, but we suspect we’ll hear more of that in the second episode. We do appreciate how Kevin admitted that once the money started rolling in for their 8 Passengers YouTube channel, he became much more willing to have Ruby record everything for public consumption. But he seemed to be either complicit or at the very least powerless against his wife’s verbal abuse of their kids; will we hear him talk about his role when the physical abuse started?
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: We see footage of Ruby Franke in a police interrogation room, asking for a lawyer.
Sleeper Star: We loved all the neighbors who, instead of saying that Ruby Franke was nice, etc., all just tear into how invasive her filming was and how unneighborly she ended up being.
Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure what to make of Ruby’s friend Paige Hanna. She seemed to be incredulous that people actually watched Ruby’s videos, but she also introduced Ruby to Hildebrandt.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Devil In The Family: The Fall Of Ruby Franke is interesting because of the participation of Franke’s ex-husband and their two oldest children. Yes, it’s a tale of a family vlogger whose real family life was pretty dark. But the viewpoint of Kevin, Shari and Chad Franke really brings home just how horrible Ruby Franke was.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.