TV REVIEW : Stepfamilies in Conflict

Cinderella and her stepsisters would feel right at home. Today there are an estimated 100 million people in stepfamilies--a natural outgrowth of the high divorce rate--and most are not happy: 75% of such unions fall apart.

The figures are from “A Step Apart,” a two-hour documentary hosted by Marlo Thomas, airing at 8 tonight on KTLA-TV Channel 5. Filmmaker Lee Stanley--whose most recent work, “Gridiron Gang,” was an intense, intimate look at a group of hardened juvenile offenders--now gives viewers that same intimate look at the members of seven stepfamilies in various stages of conflict and resolution.

One couple has three children between them--her 10-year-old and his two teens. They seem like an ideal family on the outside--the stepmother and natural mother respect each other--but as each family member speaks, scars of earlier angers and hurts are apparent on all sides.

Emotions, so close to the surface, spill over when a father speaks of his 18-year estrangement from his two grown daughters who resented his second marriage; his small son wistfully says he’d like to know his half-sisters. Another father is deeply hurt that his stepsons exclude him from their lives; he also struggles with jealousy because he feels his wife pays more attention to her sons than to him. She, in turn, is breaking under the pressure of their demands.

Then there is the divorced couple who socialize with each other and their new spouses for the sake of their two boys, who live apart. The communal barbecues may look harmonious, but as spouses and children talk separately on camera, it’s clear that resentments fester under the surface and no one enjoys the get-togethers--especially the boys.

Each family’s circumstances are different, the complexities are myriad. Yet for all the tangled reasons that keep stepfamily members at odds, Stanley’s camera reveals the one underlying emotion that can bring them together: their hunger to be loved. Communication, the film makes clear, is the key.