It's going to be really good! I'm really excited about it! The world we've found for them, their jobs, the place they're living, the people they're surrounded with is really good. It's a beautiful, messy, adult extension of the heart of The Fosters... Part of the entire reason we wanted to do a spin-off was to keep the family alive. And I know the fans are struggling, as we all are, of letting go of the show as it was, but this is what life does. You live with your family for awhile and then you move out into the world and you still have your family, you just don't get to see them every night when you go home for dinner. One of the reasons we said, 'Yes, we absolutely have to make this show,' was so that we could keep the entire Fosters clan alive.<doc-sep>Freeform is sending “The Fosters” off in style — the series is wrapping its run with a three-night “special event,” centered on Brandon’s (David Lambert) destination wedding. But those three hours, which start airing on June 4, will also serve to launch the upcoming spinoff. “These three had to kind of have a standalone feel to them,” executive producer and showrunner Joanna Johnson tells Variety. “That’s why the event of a wedding really helped — to give us a real beginning, middle, and an end — rather than just three meandering or serialized episodes. We felt strongly that these three had to have something that structured them as a piece.” The season 5 finale, which aired back in March, jumped forward in time to show all of the Adams-Fosters kids graduating from high school. But Johnson says she came up with the idea before she learned that the series wasn’t coming back for a sixth season. “We would do them either in college or post-college because I think parenting adult children, I’ve heard, is sometimes even more challenging than younger children because bigger people, bigger problems,” she says. “And that would give us freedom to tell adult stories,” she says. Johnson says the network initially wasn’t supportive of that idea, but when they decided the show would not continue on, they changed their minds — with one additional request for “The Fosters” team: “[They] wanted the audience to know, ‘Hey, there’s more story coming, we’re not done,'” Johnson says. So Brandon announced his engagement — kicking off the upcoming series wrapper. While Johnson says “there were financial reasons” behind “The Fosters” ending this year (the network declined to comment), she notes that it was Freeform who pushed to “have the show go out with something special” before launching the spinoff. “After watching this family grow and evolve over the last five seasons, we ultimately decided it was time to see the kids grow up and send them out into adulthood to face new challenges,” Karey Burke, Freeform executive vice president of programming and development, tells Variety. “We knew that by following Mariana and Callie to Los Angeles we could continue to build on ‘The Fosters’s’ legacy, all while focusing on that pivotal moment in a young adult’s life when they’re trying to find their place in the world.” The final three episodes of “The Fosters” start as the family prepares to travel to Turks & Caicos for Brandon’s wedding. And while Johnson admits her writers’ room was a little nervous because they “didn’t want to do ‘The Brady Bunch’ goes to Hawaii,” they found a way to make it feel like the show they had been doing for five years. “The show starts at home and comes back home at the end of the three-night event,” Johnson reveals. And just because the characters are older does not mean they have things all figured out. Callie (Maia Mitchell) has mixed feelings about seeing her foster brother and ex-boyfriend ready to settle down, for example. “When your first love is getting married, it brings a lot of feelings back,” Johnson says. “And the question is, ‘Is there any reason they’re not living together? Is there any reason they were meant to be but they couldn’t find their way back together?’ I don’t know that they should, but I think it’s a question that a lot of our fans are curious about.” But the Callie-Brandon relationship won’t drive the final three hours. “Every character has a conundrum or is at a crossroads,” Johnson says. For some it is the question of old relationships, but for others it is a wider ranging question of “What am I going to do with my life?” And although only Mitchell and Cierra Ramirez, who plays Mariana, are signed on to the spinoff, the other characters may not get their answers by the end of the three-night event. “The vibe we wanted to cultivate onscreen as well as offscreen was that we’re not saying goodbye to this family — they’re still out there and they’re still thriving. We’re going to check in with them and so it’s not over,” Johnson says. While not serving to directly set up the spinoff, the three-night event will set up the new dynamics now that the kids are grown, out of the house, and starting lives of their own. “We think the consequences of their actions at this age are more grave than when you’re younger, so we do feel it opens [our storytelling] up,” Johnson says. “Even with basic stuff — you can go to a bar and do the things that grownups do and it’s not an issue of ‘Oh we don’t want to promote drinking at that age. '” What is of the utmost importance to Johnson and her team, though, is bringing the sensibility of the show the audience has known for so many years into its final episodes and beyond. “The main thing we want to bring…is that sense of heart and the sense of what is your community, what is your family [especially] when you build your own in your work community or outside of your own living family?” Johnson says. “And I think the other thing is, we are of course interested in social awareness and social activism. And we think that is a very millennial thing. This Gen Z generation is more socially conscious and out there more, being provocative and wanting to change things. And I think that’s so amazing, and that’s part of what the show has always been about.”<doc-sep>
“The Fosters” will end its run on Freeform during the summer of 2018 with a three-episode limited event series, the cabler announced Wednesday. To continue the legacy of the show, though, the network has also ordered an unnamed 13-episode spinoff starring Maia Mitchell and Cierra Ramirez. “First and foremost, we want to thank our fans — our supportive ‘Fosters Family’ — and Freeform for fostering this show,” executive producers Joanna Johnson, Bradley Bredeweg and Peter Paige said in a statement. “It’s been the privilege of our lives to get to shepherd this beautiful family through five seasons of love, laughter, heartbreak, tribulation, and triumph — and message to the world that DNA doesn’t make a family, love does. All while allowing us to explore some of the most pressing social issues of our era. Now that the kids are growing up, it’s time to take them out into the world, to see them make their way into adulthood, continuing their search for identity and love, and the pursuit of their dreams and purpose in this ever changing world.” The spinoff is designed to follow Mitchell’s Callie and Ramirez’s Mariana as they move on from their high school lives living with moms Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum). Although the new show will jump in time and focus more narrowly on only a part of “The Fosters” family, it is coming from the original producing team behind the show, so it is expected to deliver the same “secret sauce” of the original. “[‘The Fosters’] wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s so bravely emotional, and there are very few depictions of families on television — nuclear or foster or blended — with the foundation of which that they love each other. They’re unafraid to be emotional and have characters that express they love each other, and they’re not stuck in time: they evolve with the culture and in many cases take on the culture,” Karey Burke, Freeform exec. vice president, programming and development, told Variety during the show’s 100th episode celebration in late 2017. “The Fosters” was created by Bredeweg and Paige, who also served as executive producers and writers on the series for the past five seasons, along with Johnson. Jennifer Lopez also served as executive producer. Greg Gugliotta, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas and Benny Medina also serve as executive producers. The series is produced by Nuyorican Productions, Inc. in association with Freeform. “The Fosters” Season 5B premieres Jan. 9 at 8pm on Freeform and will conclude with its milestone 100th episode before the limited event wraps up the series this summer.