Jennifer Lopez brings 'Fosters' to ABC Family

“The Fosters” is a study in unlikely bedfellows.

The new ABC Family drama pairs mainstream star Jennifer Lopez and Peter Paige, who played bubbly Emmett in the cult favorite series “Queer as Folk,” as executive producers. It brings to television a rare depiction of a lesbian couple as heads of a household.

And “The Fosters,” airing its third episode tonight, combines a focus on the generally ignored lives of foster children with the challenges of an ethnically diverse home — a big reach for an hour-long series aimed at teens.

“You can’t keep spoon-feeding the idea of what the perfect family is. It just doesn’t exist,” said Lopez, who’s producing with co-creators Paige and Bradley Bredeweg. “Even myself, I have two kids, their dad (Marc Anthony) doesn’t live at home with us. I’m divorced. They have four stepbrothers and sisters from two other moms. It’s not traditional. We all wish we had that fairy tale thing in our heads,” Lopez said. But when it doesn’t come true for children, they shouldn’t have to think, ‘Oh, I don’t have the mom and the dad, the perfect three kids and a dog. There’s something wrong with me,’ ” she added.

“The Fosters” stars Teri Polo (“Meet the Parents”) and Sherri Saum as Stef Foster and Lena Adams, the couple whose family includes Stef’s biological son (David Lambert) from a former marriage, adopted twins (Cierra Ramirez, Jake T. Austin) and a newly arrived foster teenager (Maia Mitchell) whose difficult past has left her wary. Oh, and Stef is a police officer who works with her ex-husband.

It makes for a tangled web that’s rich in storytelling possibilities, not just messages, its creators said.

“Draw a line between any two of these characters and there’s a relationship that hasn’t been explored before,” Paige said. “What’s it like to be the adopted brother whose best friend is the biological brother? What’s it like to be a foster child who’s come in the house and finds herself drawn to one of the boys?

An expert on the foster system consults with the show, but Paige said liberties are being taken to serve the stories. Most foster children, for example, get their own bedroom; that’s dispensed with in “The Fosters” to up the drama ante. “We are not pretending to, nor would we be interested in, doing a docu-series about the foster system. We’re after a family story where some people are chosen, where everybody has come in through a different door and finds themselves in the same room,” he said.