TV Talk: Creator imagines ‘Dinner with the Parents’ set in Squirrel Hill

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Although it’s never said exactly where the new Amazon Freevee streaming comedy series “Dinner With the Parents” takes place, feel free to assume it’s Squirrel Hill, where series creator Jon Beckerman grew up.

While the show offers little hints — in the pilot episode, the corner of a license plate is shown with the familiar blue-white-yellow Pennsylvania plate color bands visible — Beckerman said it was a “creative decision” not to be more explicit. But, he quickly added, “in my mind, the show lives in Squirrel Hill 100%.”

Beckerman even considered introducing a location inspired by the Squirrel Hill Café and still might do that if the show gets a second season.

“I just have such love for that neighborhood,” Beckerman said, “In my mind, the Langers have lived there for decades, and that’s where the heart of the show lies for me.”

The 10-episode “Dinner With the Parents,” filmed last winter in Winnersh, England, an hour west of London, premieres April 18 with four episodes followed by two additional episodes Thursdays through May 9. Each episode features a family get-together that usually devolves into chaos as the Langers bring out the best and worst in each other.

Parents Jane (Michaela Watkins, “Casual”) and Harvey (Dan Bakkedahl, “Veep”) welcome back eldest son David (Henry Hall, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) while youngest son Gregg (Daniel Thrasher) still lives at home along with them and the elderly Nana (Carol Kane, “Star Trek Strange New Worlds”), Jane’s mother. Neighbor Donnie (Jon Glaser, “Life Beth”) often pops in to cause further disruption, sometimes with his dog, Jack Lambert, named after the Steelers linebacker.

“Jon Glaser, who plays Donnie the neighbor, is from Detroit and was very game to take a shot at the Pittsburgh accent, but it ended up becoming its own thing,” Beckerman said. “Jon found some unholy marriage of Pittsburgh and Detroit and created his own coinages of things that are not Pittsburghese but Donnie-ese. He calls pizza ‘pitza.’ And boots become ‘buutz.’ ”

“Dinner With the Parents” is based on the successful Britcom “Friday Night Dinner.”

“What I thought the (British) show really captured was that thing of no matter how far you’ve come in life, no matter how much you’ve achieved, when you cross the threshold of your parents’ home, you instantly revert to some frozen-in-time, 14-year-old version of yourself,” Beckerman said. “Old nicknames, old jokes, old grievances and old relationship roles — you spring back to all of that, and it can be a little bit of an emotional pressure cooker. I thought that pressure was a great source of comedy.”

Beckerman has a younger brother, Jamie, who is now a cardiologist in Portland, Ore.

“When we get together, it might as well be 1984,” Beckerman said. “I could see myself in the older brother character (in ‘Dinner With the Parents’). I could see Jamie in the younger brother. When I took the pitch (for the series) out (to networks/platforms), I brought a printed-out photo of me and Jamie dressed in my mom’s outfits, which drives her crazy and something we’d do whenever we visited — we’d raid my mom’s closet. It felt like a really relatable family dynamic to me.”

A 1987 graduate of Shady Side Academy (and Harvard Class of ’91), Beckerman grew up in Squirrel Hill with Jamie, his mom, Natalie Beckerman, and father, Alan Beckerman, who passed away last year. Natalie now splits her time between Portland and Los Angeles, where Jon lives.

Beckerman said each of the “Dinner With the Parents” characters is named after someone in his immediate family, but he used their actual middle names as the characters’ first names: Jon’s middle name is David, the name of the oldest brother in the show; Jamie’s middle name is used for Gregg, the show’s youngest brother, etc.

The presence of Kane’s grandmother character also came from Beckerman’s real life.

“I wanted to represent the fact that for several years when I was growing up, my mom’s mom lived with us in the house,” Beckerman said. “We called her Nanny but I thought that might be confusing for viewers – she’s not THE nanny – so I made it Nana.”

Beckerman said he wound up combining traits from multiple Beckerman generations in the “Dinner With the Parents” characters.

“If I had created the show in my 20s or 30s, it would have been obvious I’m the older brother and the dad is my dad and so forth,” he said. “But since I created the show as a middle-aged guy with my own kids, I found myself combining generations in interesting ways. Whereas David is somewhat based on me in that I was a math geek growing up, I obviously didn’t choose that as my career. Meanwhile, Harvey, David’s dad, is obsessed with dad rock like Steely Dan, which I am but that was not my dad Alan’s obsession — that’s me, Jon. Now that I’m an embarrassing dad as well as an embarrassed son, I could project myself into both generations.”

Regarding the show’s sibling rivalry, Beckerman said he and Jamie were not competitive “in any substantial, meaningful way” but they had an intense sibling rivalry “in terms of zinging each other, playing jokes and things like that” which he could draw from for the series.

“Growing up it was less me versus Jamie and more me and Jamie versus our parents,” Beckerman recalled. “I’d like to lean more into that in the future in the show if we get the opportunity to make more.”

“Dinner With the Parents” marks Beckerman’s first series to be ordered and to air since the short-lived 2007 ABC comedy “Knights of Prosperity.” Since then he’s developed multiple shows that haven’t made it to air, including the passed-over 2019 Fox pilot “Adam & Eve,” which followed a couple in their youth, in middle age with kids and in retirement. Beckerman is best known for co-creating NBC’s “Ed” (2000-04) with Rob Burnett after both worked on David Letterman’s “Late Night” and “The Late Show.”

“Ed” isn’t available on streaming (aside from some poor-quality uploads to YouTube) and never got a DVD release.

“It’s something I hear about all the time,” Beckerman said. “The show would find an audience all over again if it were to stream. It’s the kind of show people would love to rediscover or stumble upon for the first time, particularly because there are four seasons and nowadays even a run of that length is becoming rare.”

Beckerman said he and Burnett occasionally “try to light a fire under somebody to make it happen” but he suspects music rights were only cleared for the original broadcast and reruns but not with an eye toward future windows of distribution like DVDs and streaming.

“It would be a nice binge,” Beckerman said. “It kills me that it’s sitting on a shelf and nobody is taking advantage of that.”