The Real Footage in ‘The Family’ Is so Scary You’ll Wish You Were Still Watching Those Cheesy Reenactments

There’s a lot of scary content on Netflix. The Haunting of Hill House was 2018’s terrifying binge, and 2019 gave us the goriest season of Stranger Things. There’s also Typewriter, which is scary but not as scary as people make it out to be, and all the content that cycles through Netflix’s horror selection. And now there’s a new addition to Netflix’s house of horrors: the political docu-series The Family.

The Family is as dense as it is addictive, a the five-part series that unfolds like Going Clear for Jesus. The Scientology connection is made clear through executive producer Alex Gibney, who took a deep dive into the inner workings of the notorious sci-fi church in the 2015 Emmy winner. This time around, he’s helped director/producer Jesse Moss (who collaborated with Gibney on the Netflix series Dirty Money) shine a light on The Family, a vast–and somehow that’s an understatement–network of affiliated individuals that span political parties, countries, and various levels of criminality but they’re all united by “a Jesus thing.”

Watching the first episode of The Family will definitely creep you out–but not in an existential, all-consuming, powerless dread. That feeling comes later. What comes first, however, is reenactments. Lots of reenactments.

Your mileage may vary regarding the use of actors in a doc, but for me, I just can’t see generic actors miming conversations under narration without immediately getting Unsolved Mysteries vibes. And since nearly all of The Family Episode 1 (“Submersion”) is told through reenactments, I kept waiting for a UFO to start hovering outside of the D.C. Jesus fraternity.

The reenactments aren’t bad at all. They’re significantly better than what you’d see Robert Stack introduce. They’re just not what I expect from a Netflix docu-series of great gravity, like a Making a Murderer or Wild Wild Country. And that’s what The Family is! This is an actual conspiracy that literally goes all the way to the top! But how else were they going to show what life was like inside the Ivanwald bro compound for journalist Jeff Sharlet? They used what little footage they had of all the Abercrombie bros raking leaves for Christian congresspeople, and they had airtime to fill! They filled it with actual actors, too, like Tessa Albertson (Younger), Zachary Booth (Damages), Ben Rosenfield (Boardwalk Empire), David Rysdahl (Bull), and Netflix regular Michael Park (Stranger Things, Tales of the City, Mindhunter, House of Cards). They even got Oscar nominee and Emmy-winner James Cromwell to play the mysterious and intimidating Family leader Doug Coe! The Family doesn’t play around!

Still, there’s a level of distance afforded the sobering subject matter because of these reenactments. The first episode plays out like it could be a Netflix series of its own, starring this exact cast. Intrepid journalist infiltrates a Christian organization and unintentionally gets sucked into their practices, from bro’ing out over parables to dunking on urges, and discovers that the org’s tendrils snake out of the house and wrap around the world. Trust me, would watch! The reenactment footage was weirdly comforting, and that quickly became a comfort I missed. By the end of the docu-series, I regretted ever wanting anything more real.

The Family gets too real. I did not know what I was asking for!

There’s a glimpse of the real Family values in the first episode, in the midst of all the reenactments. There’s video of Doug Coe preaching in the ’80s, praising the methodology of the mafia, Mussolini, Hitler, and other criminals, dictators, and imposing monsters who inspired devotion in their followers.

With that ideology in mind, the rest of the docu-series becomes like a twisted Where’s Waldo with Coe popping up in country after country, next to multiple presidents and foreign leaders. Oh cool! This guy’s just been everywhere talking to everyone, spreading his version of the gospel and trying to inspire followers to be as devoted to Jesus as the Nazis were to Hitler! Cool cool cool!

Throughout The Family, there’s a real sense of unease every time they show real footage–like they shouldn’t have access to this far-right Russian Christian propaganda or video of presidents giving shout outs to the reclusive Doug Coe. It all feels like a secret that’s being exposed, except we know it’s not a secret because the footage says C-SPAN. The Family has been operating in our government and on our televisions for decades.

There’s even footage of Coe talking to a group of international leaders within the Family, sometime around the turn of the last century.

There are shots of groups of men, all men, seated in an ornate room discussing how they plan to impose their faith on the rest of the world. One guy even sits there draped over his chair like he DGAF, like some sorta sinister, professorial Zack Morris.

I would not be surprised at all if Cigarette Smoking Man drifted into the room and glared at that guy for slouching.

But if the only terrifying thing about The Family was SD footage of dudes dismantling the separation between church and state… well, The Family would still be upsetting. The Family gets worse when the footage is imported. There’s Doug Coe approaching a bunch of kids he does not know in Norway to tell them about Jesus, and him refusing to give his name when the kids (smartly!) ask him to over and over again.

There’s all the shots of congresspeople engaging in what Sharlet calls nonconsensual diplomacy, like the one that went to Romania on a press tour to try to flip the vote and outlaw same-sex marriage (complete with Handmaid’s Tale parody ad!). There’s footage of politicians regaling their peers with tales of cozying up to African dictators that murder their citizens by saying “in the spirit of Jesus, we love you.” There’s Uganda, a nation with violently anti-gay government that The Family loves to visit and influence. WARNING: There is footage of a man being beaten to death in the street and also a literal pile of corpses in The Family, Episode 4.

Then there’s the Russia of it all, because of course. There’s footage of American evangelist Billy Graham preaching to a Russian crowd alongside a translator as well as what I guess you could call Russian spy Maria Butina’s photo diary through one of the Family’s National Prayer Breakfasts. There’s all the televised footage from recent right-wing evangelical programming praising Russia’s Christian values. And then there’s Coe’s son-in-law Doug Burleigh, who we see giving a talk with all the aw shucks wit ‘n’ wisdom of an email forward from an uncle in what looks like a megachurch’s basement, talking about his “love affair” with Russia and his history evangelizing to Russian kids he did not know. Among the many things the Family needs to knock off, interrupting kids’ playtime for Jesus talk is definitely up there.

But all of this terror is summed up in this one “joke” Burleigh makes.

There is nothing scarier than a dad joke masking the destabilization of democracy!

Stream The Family on Netflix