Warning: spoilers ahead for the series premiere of The Way Home on Hallmark.
Hallmark's The Way Home is only one episode in, and it's already combining the family drama of mothers and daughters trying to heal old wounds with time travel decades into the past. The three generations of Landry women are under the same roof for the very first time with teenage Alice (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) keeping a big secret about traveling in time, with mom Kat (Chyler Leigh) and grandmother Del (Hallmark veteran Andie MacDowell) in the dark so far. The cast spoke with CinemaBlend about the show finding a balance.
After Kat lost her job in the wake of her marriage falling apart, she decided to try and mend fences with her estranged mother up in Canada, bringing teenage daughter Alice (who had never met Del before) along to start over. Alice wasn’t thrilled about leaving her father, her friends, and everything she knew behind in the U.S. to move to her grandmother’s farm. When Kat revealed that she and Alice’s father weren't getting back together, the teenage girl snapped… and accidentally discovered the ability to time travel back to the ‘90s to interact with younger versions of mom and grandmother, who have no idea who she is.
At the end of the series premiere, Alice was still stuck in the ‘90s and looking for help. According to the cast, there will be plenty of family drama in the present to go with Alice’s adventures in the past. Sadie Laflamme-Snow opened up about how her character tries to find a balance between her family bonding (or lack thereof) in the present and her time with her teenage future mom in the past, saying:
Being able to time travel adds a certain level of complexity to your present day relationships, because Alice isn't telling anyone that this is where she is when she's not at home. The way that she stumbles upon this opportunity to go back and meet her mom when she's a teenager and see her grandmother before tragedy strikes their family, and there's this mysterious disappearance of Kat's brother. It's hard because once Alice knows that there's this real happiness and warmth and love in her family in the past, it's all she wants for the present.
Talk about a big secret to hide right after moving to a new place, without many people to confide in! Alice barely knew anything about her mom’s side of the family other than that she lost her brother many years ago. In her first trip to the ‘90s, she not only met a young Kat and younger Del, but also the little boy who would have been her uncle if he’d been able to grow up and her music-loving grandfather. So, can she bring the love she sees in her family’s past back to the present? Sadie Laflamme-Snow continued:
Without being able to directly say, 'Hey, back in 1999, we were like this. What's wrong? What's wrong here and how can we fix it?' She is on a mission to make that happen and to find a way to be together with her mom and grandmother in the present day.
Will Alice try to make changes in the past to make sure that whatever breaks the family in the ‘90s never happens, or just try to use what she learns to try to fix the relationship between Kat and Del in the present? Only time will tell, and The Way Home fortunately received an order for a ten-episode first season, which means plenty of time for twists and turns in the Landry women’s stories.
Of course, Kat doesn’t even know about all the twists and turns just yet, with Alice missing as of the end of Episode 1 and her daughter keeping that secret once she gets back. Chyler Leigh, who also shared how she’s able to make the relationship between Kat and Alice so “believable,” weighed in on how Kat will handle Alice keeping the secret:
Well, there's moments where Alice will kind of reveal something or say something and Kat is like, 'How would you know that? Did I tell you that story? Did I let you know what had happened?' Like, she would say 'You used to be such a loving family. What happened?' And it's that sense in Kat's mind where you go, 'Yeah, I mean, we really were, but why all of a sudden are you raising all of this and bringing it up?’ And compassionately doing it, and really ferociously in a sense trying to make that point, when they're still a bit at odds.
Apparently, Alice won’t be able to keep herself from dropping clues that she has some firsthand knowledge of what the Landry family was like a few decades ago. After all, the premiere proved that Del has removed most signs of what life was like before she lost her son and husband, and before her daughter moved away. There may not be many ways that Alice could come up with excuses about why she knows what she’ll know! Chyler Leigh, who joined The Way Home as her first major TV project after Supergirl, went on:
[Kat’s] like, 'Okay, you've just been saying how difficult everything is for you and I'm trying to communicate and trying to make things better.' So it's almost like where's this change of heart that's coming in? Kat has no idea that it's because Alice has met the teen version of Kat and they've just become best friends. It's been so interesting to see how they're developing the relationship and how they do or do not connect in present day.
No matter how long it takes for Kat and Del to learn the secret about Alice time traveling (if they do at all), I think we can give them a pass about not immediately guessing that Alice is visiting the ‘90s via a pond to befriend her teenage mom. The Way Home putting a time travel twist on family bonding and drama is already setting it apart from other options in the 2023 TV schedule.
New episodes of The Way Home air on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Hallmark. The new series is Sadie Laflamme-Snow’s first major TV project, but Chyler Leigh is a very familiar face on the small screen going all the way back to her Grey’s Anatomy days. As for Andie MacDowell, The Way Home isn’t her first Hallmark series, as she starred in all three seasons of the network’s Cedar Cove. Keep tuning in to the new show to see how these three actresses work together as the women of the Landry family!
