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Name: Family Dinner
Instagram: 102K Followers
Youtube: 11.2K Subscribers
What is Family Dinner?
Family Dinner is a new sitcom style web series from Lee Citron and Trevor Worley, two filmmakers who have been making comedy together since film school.
Citron and Worley both went to AFI, where Citron directed and Worley produced Martian American, a comedy about a lonely Martian trying to start a life in Los Angeles. The short won first place for comedy at the College Television Awards and sent both of them into more traditional film and television careers.
Citron went on to direct series for BratTV and TruTV. Worley stayed on the producing side and eventually built Podhead Studios in Los Angeles.
Then they created VHS Dates.
The premise focused on fake dating-service tapes from the 1980s, shot convincingly enough that plenty of viewers thought Citron and Worley had actually found an archive of lonely singles looking for love. They committed to the bit hard enough that a New York Times reporter initially believed the tapes were real. The series was later selected for Tribeca NOW in 2026.
VHS Dates had originally been a pitch that went nowhere. So they decided to make it themselves.
Family Dinner is much closer to the kind of television Citron and Worley trained to make. There is a recurring cast, episodes and a crew.
The nuance is in how they are putting it out. Scenes from the full episodes are released across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, so somebody can stumble onto Family Dinner the same way they would any other comedy reel and discover there is an actual show behind it.
Citron and Worley already made the sitcom. Rather than leave it sitting on a hard drive while they take meetings, they are putting scenes in front of people now and letting the audience discover the larger show behind them.
Three Things We Love About Family Dinner
The scenes can stand on their own: A clip can work as a complete joke in the feed without feeling like a chopped-up trailer for something else. If you like the characters, there is a full sitcom waiting behind it.
They understand how to create curiosity around a world: VHS Dates worked because people wanted to know who these strange characters were and whether any of it was real. Family Dinner is more traditional, but Citron and Worley are still good at giving you just enough of a character or situation to make you want another scene.
They are testing whether a sitcom can build from the audience out: Instead of waiting for a network to manufacture awareness after the fact, they already have the show and are letting people find it scene by scene.