Dinner With The Parents

Production Design

Jonathan Paul Green was Production Designer on Dinner with the Parents, the CBS Studios US adaptation of the hit British comedy Friday Night Dinner, relocating the story to Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Working closely with directors Tristram Shapeero and Sam Leifer, we created virtually the entire world of the family home as an extensive studio build. The interiors, backyard, front exterior at ground-floor level and rear of the house were all constructed as sets, designed to connect seamlessly with a residential cul-de-sac used for the wider exterior location.

The challenge was to make the studio-built house feel completely at home within Squirrel Hill. The architecture, materials, landscaping and dressing of the exterior sets were designed to match the character of the location, while the interiors developed that same visual language into a believable family home.

Rather than creating a collection of individual rooms, the house was conceived as an interconnected environment. Rooms, hallways, entrances and sightlines were carefully planned to give Tristram and Sam flexibility for camera movement and staging, particularly important for the ensemble performances and physical comedy.

Inside, architecture, finishes, furniture and layers of dressing gave the house a sense of family history and helped disguise the scale and technical complexity of the build. Outside, the constructed front and rear elevations and backyard extended that world beyond the interiors.

The result was effectively a complete family home created for the production — inside and out — designed to integrate with the real location and convincingly place this new American version of Friday Night Dinner in suburban Pittsburgh.