Petty’s Pizzeria
For the Petty family, the dream of being your own boss smells suspiciously like burnt cheese and bounced checks.
When a sweepstakes-gone-wrong makes this queer working-class family of five the new owners of a failing pizzeria in a fading strip mall, they quickly realize they have not just taken on a new job. They have inherited debt, deferred maintenance, regulatory risk, and a whole new contradictory position in society. They have crossed a class line unwillingly, awkwardly, and without any of the resources that make ownership feel secure.
Piper Petty wants this to finally be the win that proves her family can make it. Sam Petty, her wife, wants the chaos to stop long enough for anything to be stable. Their three teenagers, Robin, Ella, and Neil, are dragged into the family business at very different ages and with very different reactions to it. Piper’s old friend Charlie Ackerman brings real restaurant experience and an even more urgent need to belong somewhere.
The pizzeria becomes both home and trap: a place where the family finds purpose, creativity, community, and each other, but also a machine that consumes time, love, sleep, and innocence. Petty’s Pizzeria follows their daily battle against competitor chains, presumptuous clientele, regulatory confusion, supply issues, family fatigue, adolescent identity crises, local plaza politics, and the uncomfortable fact that survival through ownership can still reproduce harm.
A queer working-class family wins a pizzeria and discovers the prize is really debt.
Petty’s Pizzeria is an animated slice-of-life sitcom and family workplace dramedy set in Sterling, a fading lake city in the Continental Union. It is warm, anxious, funny, critically empathetic, and class-conscious, built around a loving family that has to face what becoming a business does to love.
Any and all pages deeper in this section of the site may include unmarked spoilers.
- The Family
- Piper, Sam, Robin, Ella, Neil, and Charlie.
- Supporting Characters
- The recurring cast of Skyline Plaza and Sterling.
- Locations
- Skyline Plaza, Sterling, and the everyday geography around them.
- Story
- An episode-by-episode guide, season by season.