Exclusive: Trey Haley Talks BET’s The Family BusinessPosted by Wilson Morales
November 27, 2018
Currently airing on Tuesdays at 9pm on BET is the eight-part drama “Carl Weber’s The Family Business,” based on The New York Times best-selling author’s most popular family crime drama novel starring acclaimed-actor and Executive Produccer Ernie Hudson.
Originally developed and produced as an indie film franchise, BET has licensed the content to air this dynamic production in an explosive way. Meet the Duncans, a prominent family from Jamaica, Queens living fast and luxurious. By day, they’re an upstanding family; by night, they live a dangerous secret life. The patriarch of the family, L.C. Duncan (Hudson), is at the age when he’s starting to think about retirement and has to decide which of his children should take over his thriving exotic car dealership. The Duncans quickly come under siege from some of the top politicians, mafia and drug cartels in the city. The Duncans will have to stick together or die separately.
Trey Haley (The Man in 3B, The Preacher’s Son) serves as director and co-executive producer for Tri Destined Studios. “Carl Weber’s The Family Business,” is executive produced by Nikaya D. Brown Jones for Tri Destined Studios and Carl Weber for Urban Books Media who also serve as the show runners. The Executives at BET who greenlit “Carl Weber’s The Family Business” are Maureen Guthman and Lorisa Bates.
Trey Haley is President and Partner at Tri Destined Studios, whose films have included the indie action/thriller “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “The Man in 3B,” “The Preacher’s Son,” “The Choir Director,” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy,”.
He recently spoke with Blackfilm.com on The Family Business.
How did this come about?
Trey Haley: We’ve been working with Carl Weber on a few projects prior to The Family Business. We did the Man in 3B, which was very successful for us. That was our first project we did together that Carl wrote, and we teamed up with Urban Books Media to produce. Then we did Preacher’s Son, Choir Director, and other projects with Carl and all his books. These are all his Times bestsellers. He was always prepping for The Family Business, which is his number-one bestseller out of all his books. And so we decided to go ahead and start shooting it as a film because it’s a book series, and then as we shot the first film last year, we started shooting the second one this year in New York.
And as we were shooting, we also have some other projects with BET going on. We have a licensing agreement with BET, and we were doing a film called Throwback Holiday that actually is airing on BET this Christmas. So as we were shooting some more of The Family Business and doing some of the other stuff with Throwback Holiday, they asked us a little bit more about The Family Business and what we were doing with it, and they said, “Hey, why don’t?” They knew that there was a possibility of us also, hey, this had the potential to be a television series as well, and we can actually edit the stuff that we’ve already shot and cut them into episodes. So that’s kind of how it got turned into what it is today.
And if it’s successful, could there be more? Does it go further, or is this just the one season?
Trey Haley: Oh yes, this goes further. This is just the tip of the iceberg with The Family Business because it’s a book series, so the book series can. He has several books and then extensions of the characters into other books like Paris, played by Javicia Leslie. That character, Paris, has her own books called Paris in Love. And he also has one that I think he’s building out with Rio’s character. All the different. We also have the how L.C. and Chippy even became who they are today, so we have the story before this all happens. So there’s a lot to play with when it comes to The Family Business and picking heads and more and more episodes. I mean, seasons as well.
How did you choose Ernie Hudson as your lead man?
Trey Haley: Yeah, so Ernie actually happened to be very, a big fan of the book series for a long time, and him and Carl, years ago, had talked about possibly doing this together as this turned into a TV show. And so it all worked out. He still was excited about it when we reached out to him and said, “Hey, Ernie. We’re really serious about doing this this time with moving forward on The Family Business.” He was all in, and it just really, Ernie was really excited about doing something very different and unique nobody’s every seen him do. So working with Ernie has been a joy.
One of the elements when you have a TV series is when you have a lot of characters, it’s all about the writing and the editing, and can it all gel together. For you, having done films, is this a new experience for you?
Trey Haley: It is. It’s very interesting in pacing of how you have to do things. Luckily I have a background in editing, so it helps me with the pacing of storyline, and then also having a couple of mentors and people around me that have done television give me a lot of advice, but you know what? Speaking to the story, Carl writes a really tight script when it comes to these things, and his stories move back and forth, so going from one character to another character’s story to another character, back and forth. It’s real easy to pace this out into an episodic concept, and because shows now look so much like movies, and they have the pacing, the look of a movie, we can shoot it in ways, and like I said, and tell the story in a tight way for television.
As you tell people who have no clue what this story’s about, what’s the selling point in seeing the series?
Trey Haley: Yeah, so basically, this is a basically a show about L.C. Duncan and the Duncan family, who decides he wants to hand over the reins of his empire or his company. I don’t want to say empire. He hands over the reins of his company to his sons and to his kids, particularly Orlando is the person who is going to take over, and there’s a lot of people around him, politicians. You have the Italian mafia, the Latin cartels, etc., etc., who see a weakness by them handing this over to this younger son to try to take over what the Duncans have built over the years. So it definitely has a … You’ve seen these The Godfather-type storylines. You’ve seen The Sopranos-type storylines. It’s built around a strong family enterprise, who are going to do whatever it takes to keep everything that they’ve built for the years, so that’s where the power of the show comes, in the family protecting what’s theirs.
Now, I know it’s not in your control as far as scheduling and timing, but when you know you’re airing on Tuesdays nights at 9 o’clock opposite a number of other TV shows with Black talent and you’re vying for a huge audience, what do you say when you’re competing against Black-ish and Black Lightning and Lethal Weapon and This Is Us.
Trey Haley: Yes. Yeah, like you said, this was the timeframe that BET said that they felt like they wanted to put this on. Obviously this is a primetime spot, especially for African-American audiences. So obviously, we just hope that there’s enough people out there who can love all this stuff. Obviously you can also DVR. You can watch it when it comes on, but the beauty of it is, Carl also has a really strong, built-in audience from these books as well. So tapping into that as well as building a new audience, and hopefully, people somehow, what’s great about the world is, we can watch all of these things now, when we want to, based on DVR. We have On Demand. There’s so many ways to watch so much, and unfortunately, and fortunately, we have more content happening, but it’s all placed on the same day a lot of times, but we are getting more content out of people of color and variety of stories that are being told, which I’m really excited about.
I love Black Lighting. I love Black-ish, and in fact, the post house that we’re working with that does the coloring for our show does both of those shows as well. And that just happened to be a company that we worked with in the past as well, so just it’s a beautiful day when we can have so much. I remember when we didn’t used to have a time when we could have [inaudible 00:07:20] competition. I don’t look at it as competition. I look at it more as new times where we’re having a lot more content out, and it just so happens a lot of it is going to be our counterparts. They deal with us everyday.
Besides the show, are you working on anything else?
Trey Haley: Yeah, so you know my business partner, N.D. Brown, who is the showrunner. I want to shout to that. She’s doing an amazing job. She’s the showrunner. Carl also is a showrunner from a creative point of view, but N.D. is our backbone. She’s scheduling, producing. She’s the one who makes this stuff work, and she’s been my business partner for over 20 years. We’ve been doing a lot of stuff together, and we have Throwback Holiday coming out December 15th on BET, and that’s one that you should look out for. I can send you the poster to that, by the way. Man, I missed out on that. I saw you posted the whole, all the Christmas holidays coming out, Christmas holiday posters. I was like, “Dang, he didn’t get mine.” But it stars Jennifer Freeman as the lead, and that one is great. Coming out this fall. We also have something coming up with Yvette Nicole Brown, called Always a Bridesmaid, something that she wrote that we will be producing next year in the top of, I guess the top of 2019. And we also have another film called Destiny, which is a basketball drama coming out next year as well. Just one of the many ones that we have, yes.
