Real Family Adventures

Shaun Cassidy didn’t have a “typical” family life. In fact, the eldest son of Oscar winner Shirley Jones and the late actor Jack Cassidy has been in the public eye literally since his birth 41 years ago.

“I was in the L.A. Times the day I was born,” says Cassidy, who, after being a teen singing idol and actor, has segued into a career as a TV writer and producer of such series as “American Gothic” and “Roar.”

“Those were the days when they actually put babies on the front page,” Cassidy adds, laughing.

Cassidy feels he has a lot in common with the characters who inhabit his latest TV series, “Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family,” which premieres Sunday on USA Network.

Peter Dobson and Melora Hardin star in this offbeat, often-funny hourlong series. It’s loosely based on the true story of a colorful FBI agent who loves his family so much that, in order to protect them from harm, he enlists his wife and three children in the dangerous world of mob infiltration.

“I know it may sound weird,” Cassidy explains. “I didn’t run around wearing a wire, but these people were, for all intents and purposes, in show business. They were acting. They had a public persona and a private persona, and the private persona was very guarded because the stakes were so high. I thought there was an interesting autobiographical something that I could bring to the party.”

“Cover Me” is seen through the eyes of the youngest child, Chance (Michael Angarano), who, as a 21-year-old, reflects upon his unconventional childhood.

“When you are born into a situation, any family is normal to a kid until they find out there are other roads,” says Cassidy. “For the most part, these kids didn’t know any different until they got much older. The narrator in our show is kind of looking at his life for the first time.”

By making Chance the narrator, says Cassidy, it sends a message to the audience that it’s OK to root for the family “because the kid survived. The voice of the narrator has a little more irony and a little more objectivity than anybody else does [in the family].”

An independent producer brought the story of this FBI family to USA Networks, where it caught the attention of David Eick, senior vice president of original series development. Eick was a producer on Cassidy’s CBS series “American Gothic.”

He thought “Cover Me” would be a good match with Cassidy. “While it is an adventure show, it is also a show about surviving your family,” says Eick.

“Certainly someone like Shaun is well-suited to explore this [theme]. His ability to write the point of view of a 10-year-old boy in ‘American Gothic’ was so uncommonly adroit and really just emotionally dead-on, I thought he would take to this environment.”

Eick also believes the series is about wish-fulfillment. “What 11-year-old kid or 16-year-old girl wouldn’t like to have this kind of adventure as part of their process of growing up?”’ says Eick.

David Kissinger, president of Studios USA, says he hopes “Cover Me” will cross age and gender barriers. “At its heart it is a family show, albeit with a very unusual twist,” says Kissinger. “The ambition is to do a show that is smart enough so that adults will enjoy it, but rebellious enough that kids will enjoy [it].”

Hardin immediately tapped into the passionate nature of her character, Barbara.

“There is something very unique for me in the show in the way you have this family that is sort of normal in a weird way and just hyper passionate about each other,” says Hardin. “ They have to be, because they are dealing with life and death all the time. They have to depend on each other in every way to be friends, to be lovers, to be a family and then above and beyond anything else to [remain] alive.”

Cassidy has had extensive conversations with the real FBI family mother, as well as two of the children. In reality, the father and one of the daughters died in the line of duty.

“They gave me a bunch of the case files of the father and we have used some of those stories to create shows,” says Cassidy. “But early on, we decided we weren’t actually going to do their lives.”

Besides, Cassidy says, he wanted to respect the real family’s privacy. “But I wanted to be able to use many details of the way they lived their lives. These were people who moved 28 times in one year and had eight different names at the same time. They would be living these concurrent existences. They embraced their dysfunction.”

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“Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family” premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. on USA. A second episode will follow at 9 p.m. The network has rated it TV-14-DVL (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for suggestive dialogue, violence and coarse language).