Brothers & Sisters

Five questions about the Season-One episode “For the Children,” from my perspective a season away from its first broadcast:

1. Do the Walkers need some new friends? Or, like, any friends at all? Sure, it’s a show about family, and this particularly close-knit bunch might be each other’s surest support. But are there no buddies here? Does Sarah not have some out-of-family female chum to talk to, does Tommy have no non-brotherly bro to have a beer with? Not only do we never see out-of-family friendships, we never hear about them, either. The only friends we’ve seen for Nora are the quick-to-turn-on-her society dame played by Meredith Baxter in this episode and the super-wacky troublemaker Emily Craft, played by Margot Kidder. With friends like that, no wonder she’s so demanding of her children’s time. In Season Two, we’ve seen two “friends” for Walker family members: Lena, Rebecca’s old chum, and Scotty, Kevin’s now-friend minus the boy-. Come to think of it, maybe they were better off with the social isolation.

2. Are Nora and Sarah trying to bring back vaudeville? You could practically hear the rim-shots during that scene when Sarah was not quite telling her mother that Ojai Foods couldn’t afford to buy a table at the charity ball. Nora would make a statement, and Sarah would undercut her with a sarcastic little reference to past events, and Nora would get all defensive. It’s not that the lines, individually, weren’t funny, but the set-ups made the mother and daughter look like some sort of comedy team.

3. Shouldn’t Tyler have known about the ball’s theme? I’m guessing this wasn’t a low-profile event. She’s a hotel manager, she might be expected to have some awareness of society functions in her area. An annual gala like this should be something that’s on her radar, and I think Justin did mention that it was for the children’s hospital, so she should know what he’s talking about. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s some top-secret rich-folk thing. And maybe she was so busy throwing her better judgment out the window so she could go out with Justin in the first place. Just seems the girl should maybe have had a clue enough to ask, “Do you mean that big Black and White ball that the women in your family have been shopping for for weeks? Find out what table we’re at so I don’t wind up looking like a character.”

4. Did the family ever go to New Zealand? Nora won that fabulous, expensive trip in the charity auction, and Kevin had a pretty good idea about them all going and hiding out there. Maybe she found a way to weasel out of her bid. But if the company could have swung it, Ojai might have been well off footing the bill and sending Holly on the trip. Then canceling that return ticket.

5. So is it true that there’s no possible way to compensate somebody for income lost by going with you to a family function? Yeah, on the face of it, the idea is offensive, and Scotty sure doesn’t need very much encouragement to take offense. On the other hand, as someone who has faulted Kevin for not being comfortable with public displays of affection, he might have recognized that it was a big deal for Kevin to invite him to a huge public event as his date. It’s an evening Scotty might also have very much enjoyed, had he hopped down off his high horse. Shouldn’t he have been able to have a special night out with Kevin without having to give up needed income? And if so, wasn’t there any good way that Kevin could have made that happen?

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Brothers and Sisters, ABC, 36 Hours, commentary