Jay DeMarcus is best known to his fans as one-third of Rascal Flatts, but he’ll soon be better known as the fun-loving patriarch of the DeMarcus family, thanks to the new Netflix show DeMarcus Family Rules. Premiering on Aug. 19, Season 1 of the reality series follows Jay, his wife, Allison, and their two kids, Madeline and Dylan, “as they balance every day chaos, juggling music and family.”
Jay, Allison and their kids had all previously appeared on Chrisley Knows Best due to their friendship with the Chrisley family, and it was Todd Chrisley who suggested that his friends film a show of their own. “The more we did it, the more fun we had,” Jay recalled to PopCulture.com for our series, PopCulture @ Home. “Todd took us to dinner one night and said, ‘You guys have been really great on my show and I really believe that there’s a show there with you guys. You’re so funny and you’re so great together and your kids are so cute and funny and unpredictable. And I really think people would relate with a lot of the situations that you guys live through.’”
Videos by PopCulture.com
The musician shared that he and Allison “had to be talked into the idea,” explaining that they wanted to protect their kids and that he wanted to protect the image of Rascal Flatts that he had built with bandmates Gary LeVox and Joe Don Rooney over the past 20 years. “We thought about it for a long time,” Jay said. “It’s a big leap to have cameras around all the time and capturing all of that.”
The show’s title came from the rules Allison grew up living, which she’s since passed on to her own family, a hand-me-down her husband likened to a good recipe. “It’s a set of rules that Allison was raised by and it’s handed down from her mother generation after generation,” Jay said. “It’s like a biscuit recipe. Every female in the family gets handed down the rules.”
The differences between the self-proclaimed “ultimate odd couple” are a focal point of the series — he’s the dad who just wants to show his kids a good time and planned a camping trip that went awry while she’s the mom who always has a plan and lays out her son’s shoes for each day of the week — but it’s those differences that have made their marriage of over 15 years so successful.
“I think that for us, our differences are what makes us strong. We balance each other out really, really well,” Jay noted. “And I think if we were a lot alike, we wouldn’t have lasted this long. We would have driven each other crazy. I’m artistic, I’m emotional, I access my emotions very easily. She buries her emotions a lot and doesn’t like to talk like ever.” “If I were sitting around talking about my emotions as much as Jay talks about his, we would never get anywhere,” Allison interjected, “because we would just be sitting around talking and emoting all the time.”
Ultimately, Jay and Allison hope that viewers are able to relate to their own families’ experiences while watching the show, and enjoy a few laughs during a time when they might be hard to come by.
“I feel like no matter where you are in the season of your life, we all deal with the same family situations in our house,” Jay shared. “And I think that at the end of the day, you got to be able to laugh at yourself, and the love you have for one another and your family will carry you through most things that you’re confronted with in this life. And I hope that people can laugh a little bit because we’ve all been living through enough crap, during this time, the past six months, there is no doubt about it. So hopefully we’ll give people a reason to laugh at themselves, while they laugh at us.”
DeMarcus Family Rules is now available to stream on Netflix.
