If All The Empty Rooms had you reaching for the tissues and Take Care of Maya had you screaming at your TV, you won’t want to miss a brand new documentary hitting streaming on Tuesday, May 19. The two-part docuseries The Nightmare Upstairs: What Happened to Ty & Bryn? premieres on Disney+ and Hulu, the latest work from the creative team behind Take Care of Maya. In much the same way, this series promises to be a heavy watch, but one with sprawling implications about how custody and family court play out in the U.S. — particularly for the children caught in the middle.
In 2023, siblings Ty and Brynlee Larson, then aged 15 and 12, made national headlines when they barricaded themselves in Ty’s bedroom for 54 days, refusing to follow a judge’s order that they return to their father’s home “despite state child welfare investigators determining that he had sexually abused the children,” ProPublica reported at the time. The pair livestreamed their defiance of the order on TikTok, garnering millions of views and “igniting a viral national reckoning,” according to a press release from ABC News Studios.
The judge’s order came after Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services found in 2018 that their father, Brent Larson, had sexually and emotionally abused his children, calling the abuse “severe & chronic,” per ProPublica. At the time, he was restricted to supervised monthly visits and received a 150-day restraining order prohibiting him from contacting his children. However, Larson denied the accusations and instead accused the children’s mother, Jessica Zahrt, of “parental alienation.”
Parental alienation “occurs when a child refuses to have a relationship with a parent due to manipulation, such as the conveying of exaggerated or false information, by the other parent,” according to Psychology Today. It has been discredited by major scientific organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association and World Health Organization, but remains a common and often successful defense against abuse allegations in family court.
Maybe you’ve never heard about Bryn and Ty’s story before, or maybe you watched it play out in real time on social media. Either way, The Nightmare Upstairs includes never-before-seen footage from their 54 days locked in, police interviews, and court records, illustrating exactly how this family arrived at such a dramatic point. Viewers will also hear directly from Brent and Jessica, who both deny the other’s allegations against them.
This part of the press release has me itching to watch and see what happens: “After 54 days in the barricade and livestreaming nonstop to tens of thousands, the judge reevaluates their custody case, allowing rare cameras inside the courtroom. As Ty and Bryn’s fate hangs in the balance, their father does something unexpected that forever changes everyone’s lives.”
If you want to find out where Ty and Bryn are today, we’ll all have to tune in. The Nightmare Upstairs will be ours next Tuesday, May 19.
