Brothers and Sisters: Zzzzzzzzzz…
Wake Me Up When/If Something Interesting Finally Happens
After having finally seen the pilot of the new, previously much-hyped (at least before all manner of personnel and plot changes turned it into a big question mark) family drama Brothers & Sisters, I cannot begin to understand what everyone was so excited about when it first became known that the series would be a major player in ABC’s Fall 2006 schedule, winning the highly coveted Sunday-night, post-Desperate Housewives time slot recently vacated by the mega hit Grey’s Anatomy. Sure, there are television stars galore in the cast—including Ally McBeal‘s long-absent teeny-tiny Calista Flockhart, Six Feet Under‘s film-tv crossover artist Rachel Griffiths, and woefully cancelled Alias‘ Ron Rifkin and Balthazar Getty—not to mention that flying nun and widely respected movie thespian, Sally Field herself. With all of this obvious talent, why then is Brothers & Sisters about as compelling as, well, interacting with your own family?
The premise of the series is good enough: a gaggle of five adult siblings flock around their parents’ home in suburban Los Angeles. Each has an independent life separate from the central family unit; yet, somehow, they all tend to wind up right back in each others’ faces at the end of the day. In the pilot, successful conservative radio commentator Kitty Walker (Flockhart) mulls the plusses and minuses of relocating from New York to Los Angeles in order to make the big leap to a televised political chatfest show, or to remain in the grittier Northeast with her just-this-side-of-overbearing Republican sweetie Jonathan (Matthew Settle). Kitty also happens to be deeply estranged from her mother Nora (Field), a caring but passively aggressively opinionated matriarch.
Rounding out the modern Waltons-like clan are big sister Sarah Whedon (Griffiths), who has an integral Vice President job working for her father William (Tom Skeritt) in his seemingly successful business; brother Thomas (Getty), who we really don’t learn that much about in the debut episode other than that he works for daddy alongside sis, too; baby brother Justin (Dave Annable), a military vet whose experiences in Afghanistan following 9/11 haunt him now that he’s back in the States; and token gay brother Kevin (Matthew Rhys), who seems to be present just to add some painfully needed diversity and spice to the unicolor main cast. And let’s not forget evil Alias surrogate-daddy-wannabe Arvin Sloane, transformed here into evil fishy-finance-handler Uncle Saul.
Of course, no family drama about a multigenerational brood this size would be complete without unsettling skeletons in the closet, and the premiere tries to pique the audience’s curiosity with a few. What is surreptitious Uncle Saul doing with all of the family business’ money that is supposed to be in those now almost empty pension funds? How did Kitty get to be such a staunch right-winger with parents who seem decidedly less rabid about politics? Did big sister Sarah really contemplate having an affair with hunky Noah Guare (Third Watch alum Michael Beach), potentially jeopardizing her marriage to hunky Joe (John Pyper-Ferguson)? Why does Kevin really avoid bringing any of his boyfriends to the family home, where everyone obviously knows and accepts that he’s gay? And, most importantly, why does that stupid little girl just stand there watching at the end instead of going and getting her grandmother, like her grandfather told her to?
As this list of unanswered questions reveal, one of the main reasons Brother & Sisters doesn’t work that well is not because of bad acting or poor scripts, but simply because the plot isn’t all that interesting or unique, especially in an era where 24-style bombast rules the small screen. Add the fact that the pace moves along like a tortoise, making fellow newcomers such as light romantic dramedy Men in Trees appear almost high-octane in comparison, and the outlook gets worse. It took the pilot almost an entire sixty minutes, in other words its entire length, to finally get to the pivotal event of not just the episode, but the series itself. Yet, by the time that anticlimactic scene crawled into view, I had already determined that Brothers & Sisters is only for those TV viewers who adore one or more of the actors, or who like their shows blunt-edged and full of family “secrets” that you really don’t give a hoot about in the first place. What a shame, though, since the cast really is stellar.
The Verdict: B-
Brothers & Sisters currently airs Sundays at 10pm EST on ABC
Brothers & Sisters photo courtesy of ABC
