Family Tree

Season

2013

USA

7.4

TV-MA

From Christopher Guest ('Best in Show, ' 'A Mighty Wind') comes this comedy series that follows one man's quest to track down his genealogy.

Episode List

S1 • E1

The Box

Brought up in Ireland by his mother, Tom Chadwick returns to England when he and his sister Bea--who communicates through a monkey puppet--visit their father Keith and are told of a box that a great-aunt left them. Its contents include the photo of a distinguished.

S1 • E2

Treading the Boards

Tom sees a photo of his great-grandfather Harry in costume for "The Mikado" and travels with Pete to Hove to meet the very elderly Sybil, who used to live next door to Harry. Rex gives Tom the horse costume and he and Pete wear it in a charity race and come in last.

S1 • E3

The Austerity Games

After Bea and Tom visit their grandparents' graves, Tom notices from an old clipping that their grandfather William competed in the "Austerity Games", the London Olympics of 1948. They also discover that their great-aunt Vera left her flat to Mildred Budgens.

S1 • E4

Country Life

Tom traces his American ancestry to Charles and Rebecca Chadwick, who came to England and had three children--Victoria, Brian, and Tom's great-grandfather Harry. Tom, Bea, Keith, and Keith's Moldovan wife Luba head to a farm in Derbyshire to meet Tom's great-uncle's son Graham.

S1 • E5

Welcome to America

Tom arrives in California to stay with Al and Kitty, who make him very welcome--although he is inexplicably scared of their cat. Meanwhile, in the middle of the night he is awakened by a Skype from Monkey, who reports that Bea has lost her job.

S1 • E6

Civil War

Pete rings Tom to tell him he has a job interview on return to England, but Tom and his cousins are more intrigued by photographs showing Charles in uniforms of soldiers of both the North and South, suggesting that he changed sides at the end of the Civil War.

S1 • E7

Indians

After going on a date with Ally, Tom finds out that Rebecca was apparently a Mojave Indian. so he meets Bea and Pete in his expensive hire car and they head off for the reservation at Barstow. Meanwhile, they spend the day pretending to be natives.

S1 • E8

Cowboys

Ally and Tom visit Melvin to see evidence of his grandfather, Jewish cowboy star Tumbleweed Tim, whose silent-film career was ended by scandal. Meanwhile, Bea goes ape when Monkey goes missing, until Tom discovers that he has been donated to a charity worker.