How Martin Freeman’s ‘Breeders’ Exposes Every Parent’s Guilty Secret – Contenders TV
The first scene in Season 1 of Breeders arrived fully formed for Martin Freeman courtesy of a dream, he said during the FX series’ panel at Deadline’s Contenders Television awards-season event.
In his imagined experience, Freeman paced the stairs of his home on the way to admonish his children, who were refusing to sleep. Trying to contain his simmering anger, Freeman attempted to talk himself down, or at the very least, persuade himself to keep a cool head. Inevitably, however, as he reached the bedroom, he unleashed hell.
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The FX comedy plays this out, almost beat-by-beat, as the besieged Paul wrangles with his rage. It sets the tone for the first two seasons of the Avalon-produced comedy, which was conceived over therapeutic lunches between Freeman and writers Simon Blackwell and Chris Addison, during which they ruminated on the darker side of parenting.
“We were telling each other things that we never really said to other people, it was incredibly freeing. We discovered in doing that, there were a lot of things that we all had in common, but we felt made us bad people. That’s really the trust of the show,” Addison said.
“It’s about a loving family, who adore their children, would do anything for their children, would die for their children… but there’s also that other thing that never gets spoken of, which is that nothing makes you angrier than your children.”
Check iout the panel conversation in the video above.
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