In the Paramount+ limited series Little Disasters, Jess (Diane Kruger) takes her daughter to the hospital and soon finds herself in the crosshairs of child services and tremendous emotional stress when her friend Liz (Jo Joyner), a doctor at the hospital, feels it’s her duty to report that Jess’ daughter shows signs of physical trauma that Jess herself may have caused.
Awards Buzz spoke with Kruger, Joyner, and Sarah Vaughan, who wrote the novel on which this show is based and serves as an associate producer, about whether this project will appeal to or turn off parents. Kruger praised the show’s themes and general entertainment quality:
“This is every parent’s worst nightmare. I think we all know what it could feel like to lose a child. Everything is heightened. We all know what the arrival of a kid means for a relationship, and this really strange group of friends that shows up with parenthood. All these mothers from preschool and from school gatherings that come into your life. It’s a very particular time in everyone’s life. I do think it’s a really fun show, it’s a very entertaining show. It’s a whodunnit. It’s fast-paced and it has all the elements of what I love to watch in a show, and the rest just, hopefully, is very authentic. We’ll see.”
Joyner relished the opportunity to work with a cast of a certain age:
“I think it absolutely would appeal to new parents of young children. For sure! Because there’s so much to identify with, and I don’t think it would scare them too much. I don’t know what the statistics are, but there will be people who will watch, as new parents, and really need to see this and see that this is a thing that exists, this post-natal anxiety. It could save a lot of heartache, couldn’t it, actually, if that was the case? I think one of the things that we’ve all really enjoyed when we were away, we had a cast that was of such a similar age. Most of us are usually working on things where the cast goes in a ladder and there are lots of young teens or young twenties at the forefront, and then middle-aged people in the middle and then older grandparents. This whole breadth of generations. It’s quite unusual to have a cast which is this many middle-aged people, and it was really great having a lot of forty-year-olds. Consequently, offscreen, our conversation was about parenting and working and so many of the themes that we were actually filming.”
Vaughan weighed on the importance of showing a real-life phenomenon that’s more common than even she thought:
“It’s a universal theme, parenthood, isn’t it, really? Either we are parents or we’ve got siblings or friends who are parents. We’ve all been children. We’ve all got mothers, haven’t we? So there’s a universality to it. When I wrote the book, I thought that only one to two percent of women had perinatal OCD, but actually, while researching to do press for this, I realized that it’s actually between nine or sixteen percent, I think. If you’ve had a form of OCD beforehand, you’re far more predisposed to have it.”
Watch the videos above to hear more about the process of adapting the book for TV and how these women believe audiences should best experience watching the series.
All six episodes of Little Disasters are streaming on Paramount+.
