We love our genealogy series, don’t we? We want to know if our favorite comedian had a distant relative who was royalty or, perhaps, spent time in prison. But in a new Acorn TV series, the family histories that are examined are of everyday people who have huge family secrets they’ve had to deal with their entire lives.
Opening Shot: Donna Carr introduces herself and expresses her desire to find someone in the genealogical line of her father who was “good.”
The Gist: In the new docuseries Relative Secrets, hosted by Jane Seymour, archaeologist Natasha Billson digs into the family histories of people who have secrets that they have been living with and want to face head on or ones that have been kept under wraps for decades.
Donna, who lives in West Virginia with her husband Jim, has been living with the fact that her father Robert Carr admitted to being a serial killer in the 1970s, when Donna was about 12 years old. It wasn’t a pleasant childhood, with her father constantly moving their family around. Even after he went to prison and Donna cut off contact, he would send her sexually explicit letters.
Her grandfather had a stint in Leavenworth for grand theft auto. Needless to say, she wanted to find someone in her father’s family line who was, in Donna’s words, “good.” The person she targeted was her great-great grandfather, Nicholas Carr, but had run into a dead end while researching his life.
In the research Natasha and the show’s staff did to trace Nicholas Carr’s journey from Ireland to Wilmington, NC, they do end up finding something distressing: He was in prison for about a year on a manslaughter charge. But he ended up being a model inmate and a bastion of the community afterwards. The researchers also looked into the genealogy of Donna’s daughter Hailey, on the side of her late father.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Relative Secrets is similar to other genealogy shows like Finding Your Roots and Who Do You Think You Are?
Our Take: Like the other shows we mentioned above, Relative Secrets finds its drama in the surprises that Natasha Billson and the staff find during their research. In the case of Donna, there is no secret to reveal; she’s had to live with her father’s past for over 50 years and just wanted to find a ray of light in a family line that was anything but.
Billson does the bulk of the work on this series, travelling to visit each episode’s subject and spending time with them and their families. Seymour’s presence is more via Zoom from her home in Dublin, save an initial in-person consultation with Billson. However, she does project empathy and warmth for Donna, and readily talks about her own family secret with Billson; her mother was in an internment camp in Japan during World War II.
There isn’t a whole lot of dynamic scenes in the episode, since much of it takes place via Zoom calls. We’re also not entirely sure how much time Billson actually spends with each episode’s subject, given that we saw Donna wearing the same shirt throughout the episode. Still, any new information that was unearthed about Nicholas Carr was interesting, and seeing Donna deal with the fact that he had a sordid history that he got past made for a satisfying narrative.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Donna gives and update to Seymour and Billson about how she’s found closure after hearing about her great-great grandfather’s full history.
Sleeper Star: We appreciated how supportive Donna’s daughter Hailey was, and liked the fact that she’s independent enough to want to travel to Europe on her own to visit her late father’s family’s hometown.
Most Pilot-y Line: Again, it seems that some of the Zoom conversations are either filmed awkwardly or sound more staged than they need to be.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Relative Secrets is interesting because, despite being a bit on the dry side, it’s always interesting to see someone’s family history being revealed. And, here we get to see the histories of people with bad secrets in their histories, instead of the celebrities we see in other shows.
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.