Brothers & Sisters

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Tommy Walker, and how this new plot that has him apparently having an affair with the office manager while his wife struggles with depression at her faraway parents’ house, presents a decidedly different model from the one we met last season.

Tommy was originally established as the stable, steady brother with the good marriage and the business sense who could be sort of a viewer surrogate in rolling his eyes and smiling at the outrageous doings of his brothers and sisters. He had a few challenges — infertility, anger at Justin — but he seemed in general the least neurotic and most down-to-earth of the bunch. And I’m not saying this just because I am Tommy, according to the “Which Walker Are You” quiz.

The show certainly needs one bemused voice of reason among the chaos. But I think something happened around midseason last year that brought Tommy to the reason-free rounder he is now: The arrival of Robert McCallister. He’s kind of taken over that, “Well, they’re nuts, but they’re family” attitude that grounds the Walker shenanigans in an amusing way.

And not to take anything away from Balthazar Getty, but: Rob Lowe is just awesome at it. Some folks have bemoaned the senator’s lack of flaws, but that doesn’t bother me. He works as kind of a Greek chorus of sane-ness, and makes all the twittering more enjoyable thereby. Robert is one of my favorite characters, if only for his unflappability in the face of Kitty’s … flappiness.

But that leaves Tommy with no particular position to fill. The writers had trouble finding anything much for his character to do last season, and now they may be feeling a need to just rewrite the fella with a few of those there flaws they’re not using on the senator. I guess it’s inevitable. I just wish they weren’t so obvious. I would have thought being a workaholic could have been a useful flaw for him, with a new baby at home. Plenty of room for tension between him and Julia there, without the kind of overblown drama of a mental breakdown on one hand and casual cheating on the other.

I’m still kind of hoping against hope that the Tommy/Lena action is more innocent than it appeared, and the writers are teasing us again. That’s irritating, but not irredeemable. Still, there remains the challenge of finding where Tommy fits in this particular loopy group. If he really did cheat, he’s not going to fit in very comfortably for a long time. And if he didn’t, he’s at risk of going back to the Land of Characters We Just Plain Don’t Know What to Do With.

Brothers and Sisters, ABC, Tommy, Robert, Balthazar Getty, Rob Lowe