The Family Business
“You can’t protect the world and the people you love in it at the same time.”
Two Secret Service agents, an FBI agent, a Department of Justice officer, and a U.S. Marshall.
What do they all have in common?
The Hollingsworth family.
While it may sound like the beginning of a bad bar joke, this family knows that nothing they do is a laughing matter.
NBC’s newest series, Line of Fire, is about a family of law enforcement agents who struggle to bridge personal differences and cross professional boundaries in service to the public.
Starring Peter Krause as Mike, Hope Davis as Jane, Kat Cunning as Clare, Tommy O’Brien as Micah, and Taylor Bloom as Russ, Line of Fire tackles family drama through an unusually tangled professional lens.
Yet it seamlessly weaves between humor and depth in a way that doesn’t allow the audience to settle for too long, but just enough to feel the weight of the story.
NOTE: Light premiere spoilers ahead
Line of Fire approaches family crime drama with an energy reminiscent of the height of the 2000s while pulling the audience into a unique dynamic that is fresh, grounded, and oddly spicy.
For a show that should feel off-kilter and out of place, the Hollingsworth family is a humorous reflection of a family of professionals who solve more cases than their own personal issues.
Estranged spouses.
Secret boyfriends.
Unprofessional relationships.
And the pressures of family legacy.
It all collides and collapses under the weight of a family who knows how to be there for everyone but each other.
But how do you repair something that you didn’t know was broken until it was too late?
As the family struggles to come to grips with their new dynamics that threaten to pull them further apart, justice works even harder to bring them back together.
Even if it’s only for a little while.
The Case They Struggle to Solve
The beauty inside the chaos is the Hollingsworth siblings—adults who never abandoned the kids inside them who need their mom and dad.
The adults who fight for identity and agency in professions where they are defined by the reputations of their parents.
And the parents have their faults.
Mike and Jane are estranged.
But the way they brought up their children didn’t suddenly disappear once they decided to temporarily call it quits.
The damage lingers.
And it lingers within the children because the mess was never addressed.
Every new case, every new victim made it easier to ignore the problems growing at home.
But another thing that lingers between the Hollingsworth parents is the love that never found a reason to fade away—punctuated by the secret affair they’ve been having with one another behind the kids’ backs.
It’s revelations like these that make Line of Fire exciting.
While the introduction of the series may seem scattered and disconnected, Line of Fire uses the Hollingsworths’ professions to set the stage for real interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration to solve cases.
This is what makes the show unique.
Most crime series focus on a specific profession, bringing in departmental agencies across one or two episodes before refocusing on the original storyline.
But Line of Fire isn’t bound by jurisdictional prudence.
It takes the professional family dynamic that occurs among law enforcement and amplifies that by making it literal.
Episode 1 sets the stage.
And the stage ends on a jaw-dropping bombshell that changes everything we assumed about the series.
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More Crime, More Drama
Kivonshe—founder of So There’s That—is a film & TV critic who explores compelling storytelling, fandom relationships, character psychology, and the impact of entertainment media through film reviews, episodic recaps, and in-depth theme analysis.