Is It Prime Time for a New ‘Family’?

While filming the one-hour pilot for “American Family” last month, producer and director Gregory Nava hid his smirk when CBS studio executives visited the set with wide eyes.

“They’ve never been to East L.A., and they’re like, ‘Wow! This isn’t what I expected,’ ” Nava said, laughing.

But the humor cuts because Nava doesn’t know if they’ll ever be back.

The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker is now closer than anyone has ever been to getting a Latino family drama on network television, and next week CBS executives will tell him if they’ll pick up “American Family” as a fall series.

There are high-stake consequences to both outcomes.

If the pilot bombs, many industry watchers anticipate the networks will say they gave a Latino the opportunity to dazzle them with “ethnic” material and it didn’t live up to their standards. If it is picked up but receives tepid ratings, “American Family” once again will underscore the networks’ long-standing contention that “ethnic programming” isn’t profitable because it fails to draw a broad audience.

Lastly, because Nava will be presenting a family that has never been seen regularly on prime-time television, the fictional Gonzalez family of East L.A. will be scrutinized. Are they realistic characters? Is he glorifying East L.A.?

Nava is, in no uncertain terms, facing a tough few months ahead. He might want to call Steven Bochco, producer of last season’s first black drama, “City of Angels.” The critically well-received hospital drama on CBS has drawn lackluster ratings, and its fate for next season remains unclear.

While Bochco’s career was built on the small screen with hit series like “Hill Street Blues” and “NYPD Blue,” Nava’s roots are in filmmaking. His first project, “Confessions of Amans,” was reviewed in the New York Times in 1977 as a film “so rigorously disciplined and composed it looks as if it were the work of someone who is nearing the end of a career and has long since abandoned the tricks of a trivial trade.” Nava’s 1984 independent film, “El Norte,” about a brother and sister’s journey from their Guatemalan homeland to the United States, earned him an Academy Award nomination and a Writers Guild of America award for original screenplay. Two years after its release, “El Norte” was named to the Library of Congress’ National Registry of Films.

In subsequent years, Nava became more commercial, directing the 1995 film “Mi Familia” and 1997’s “Selena.” “I’ve never done television,” he said. “But it’s all just visual storytelling. Everyone who’s involved feels that the talents that I have are very good for TV.”

A Unique Case of Pressure

Few Latinos have enjoyed the opportunities Hollywood has presented to Nava. Film and television actor Edward James Olmos, who plays the patriarch in “American Family,” has had a development deal with ABC for almost four years and none of his projects have ever been produced. Olmos said Latino-themed projects need high-ranking executives to shepherd them through the pitch process, like Nava has had from CBS’ own president, Leslie Moonves.

“Is it getting special treatment? I think so,” Olmos said. “I don’t think you can have a show like this without someone taking care of this.”

All new shows have to carry their weight, but if it makes it onto the CBS schedule, ratings for “American Family” would have to eclipse what executives still consider a “risk” in airing a program with so many faces and story lines that haven’t been on television before.

“We absolutely feel that pressure,” said Robert Greenblatt of Greenblatt Janollari Studio, the show’s co-executive producer.

“Greg feels that pressure more directly because a lot of Latino filmmakers and actors are looking for him to make the breakthrough. The time slot’s got to be perfect. The marketing’s got to be great. The network has to be behind us--more than with other shows. There’s huge pressure.”

One way they’re trying to minimize that risk is by tweaking the show’s appearance or plot lines based on responses by focus groups. Nava is already shopping around for a title that he hopes would capture the feel of the show more effectively than “American Family.”

Boyle Heights as Primary Backdrop

The show is narrated by the character Cisco Gonzalez (played by newcomer Jay Hernandez), who videotapes family gatherings to post on the Gonzalez Web site he’s created. Cisco, the family’s “baby,” is a college student who studies film and plays in a rock ‘n’ roll band.

“He’s a cyberpunk Chicano guy,” Nava said.

Most of the pilot takes place in the Gonzalez family’s solidly built East L.A. home, where a wide porch offers a smoggy view of power lines and palm trees. Using Boyle Heights as its primary backdrop, the set is just 10 blocks from where Olmos grew up. On the last day of filming in early April, East L.A. seemed at a distance from its sometimes violent reputation. Children played in fenced-in front yards and watched the pilot crew. An old man pushed an ice cream cart down a side street. Latinas hurried by one of the actor’s trailers to pick up their children from the nearby elementary school.

Wearing oversized sunglasses, Nava sat on a low wall near the set and pointed out that he’d like to invite viewers into this complex, three-dimensional world--one where tired stereotypes don’t hold up anymore. He’s asked the quintessentially East L.A. band Los Lobos to provide music for the pilot, and Nava’s friend, legendary guitarist and Grammy Award winner Carlos Santana, may write the theme music if the series is picked up. Like Santana and Los Lobos, the cast is overwhelmingly Latino, with actors like Esai Morales, Raquel Welch, Marie Constance and Brazilian-born Sonia Braga.

‘Trickiest Thing’ Was Casting

Most of the actors have worked with Nava before and with one another, a testimony to the size of the group to which working Latino actors belong. Olmos and Braga, who play Jess and Berta Gonzalez in “American Family,” have even played husband and wife before in “Roosters,” which was made for PBS’ “America Playhouse.”

“The trickiest thing we encountered was casting it. Gregory Nava wrote the piece with some very specific actors in mind who had either not done television before or at least not in a very long time,” Greenblatt said.

Olmos, the most expensive actor lured to the series, plays the show’s patriarch. A loving but deeply neurotic man, Jess is staunchly conservative. From the dinner table to his barbershop in East L.A., he rants about joggers who listen to Walkmans, health freaks who drink wheat grass, gangbangers and proponents of bilingual education.

“I’d been wanting to do a character like him for a long time,” Nava said. “He’s born here. He fought in the Korean War. Everyone has a Jess Gonzalez in the family, but they keep him in the closet.”

Olmos describes him as “a cross between Zorba the Greek and Archie Bunker.” (He also adds that the Jess Gonzalez in his real-life family is his older brother.)

But while the character was initially created to provide most of the drama’s lightest moments, co-producer Barbara Martinez-Jitner said Jess emerged as a more provocative character during editing.

“He could easily be a comical character, a father who’s completely baffled by his children. Instead, when he deals with a loss, he really bares it all and reveals himself,” she said. “Before he was the patriarch with very strong control of his home, and in [one] scene he says, ‘I’m lost,’ and [his daughter] takes care of him.”

The daughter, Nina (Constance Marie), decides her destiny during the pilot. As a pro bono attorney, she must choose between ambitions that pull her away from East L.A. and her family’s needs that anchor her within the barrio.

Cast Members Shape Roles to Reality

Nina’s mother, Berta, portrayed by Braga, is a Mexican immigrant who defers to her husband. “She’s a marvelous character and she’s strong, but I don’t want to lie about what she’s like,” Nava said. “Mexican mothers from that generation--it’s a misogynist culture. I don’t want to suddenly make people different.”

For Welch, “American Family” offers her a chance to play to her ethnic heritage; she was born Raquel Tejada, a Bolivian American. “For this to happen at this point in my career would be poetic justice,” Welch said. “. . . To be ‘Raquelita’ for a change, instead of having to play against it and be so Anglo.”

At the very least, “American Family” is an intriguing--and expensive--experiment to push television’s race barrier beyond a black vs. white context. Nava is hopeful that CBS will pick it up as a series. Then, he hopes, everyone can forget the show was initially conceived as a cultural breakthrough and will see it as a evocative, entertaining family drama.

“All the films I’ve done from ‘El Norte’ on, I just wanted to tell stories,” Nava said. “I didn’t set out to do something pioneering. When Francis Ford Coppola made ‘The Godfather’ initially, it was seen as being ethnic and different because it was about an Italian family. That’s what I’m working toward.”