Dawson must be so jealous. When Katie Holmes returns to TV on Oct. 21, she'll set her sights on another small-screen hunk: Eli Stone (Jonny Lee Miller). Sparks will fly between the nonprofit lawyer and the real-life Mrs. Cruise, who will also get a chance to show off her — who knew? — musical chops on the show.
Read all about her guest-starring performance — as well as the possibility for an encore — after the jump.
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So, before I talk about this week's episode, I thought I might catch you all up on the goings on at Stages 6 & 7 at Disney. It's been a while since I wrote an episode. Sunday night's "Love is Difficult" (co-written with humor and grace by Ms. Molly Newman) represents my first writing on Brothers & Sisters since "Mistakes Were Made, Pt 1." Also, today I finished co-writing episode 18 with Marc Guggenheim, and Greg Berlanti and I are going to pen the season finale together, which I am looking forward to. His hand is on all the scripts, and I freely acknowledge that we would not be here had it been left to me alone — Greg understands the delicate and sophisticated balance of dark and light, escapism and truth-telling that works here. I honestly believe that my episodes would have been a miasma of angst without his gentle touch, and we'd be off the air. Not that I don't have a sense of humor — I mean, I know my way around a joke — but somehow, I tend to gravitate ...
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Okay, so I’m going to take a different tack today with the blog. I’m going to try and share what I think about when I dream of Brothers & Sisters -- how it can reflect the country we live in now and serve as a dramatic discussion of American values. We all heard the news that ex-athlete and killer – see civil court conviction – O.J. Simpson has sold a book called If I Did It. And that Rupert Murdoch’s Regan Books is publishing the thing, which seems to be a kind of stunt-like game of literary and legal peek-a-boo. Not only that, Murdoch’s Fox Network is making it into a TV show. It’s all contemptible, of course. Assumes the worst of audiences and readers. Assumes that the populace is so numb that it requires the frisson of cheap titillation the way heroin addicts need their fix.So, what does this have to do with Brothers & Sisters? A lot, actually, in that it begs an examination of our choices and the kind of moral universe we live in. It p...
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Dateline: Venice, California. Some ruthless bug has totally sidelined me. Symptoms include fever and coughing, paranoia and lassitude. Not wishing to become the Typhoid Mary of Brothers & Sisters, I have banished myself to home, and I am going quietly mad in my exile. What is the evil genius, Dr. [Greg] Berlanti cooking up in my absence? Is Balthazar Getty running naked through the hallways? Is Ron Rifkin trying to seize control of the whole show? Will Touchstone fire me and have my house burned down? Has ABC kidnapped my dog Trip and put him on Dancing with the Stars? All these fears and I've only been out of the office for two days. The idle time has given me room, however, to daydream about where the show is headed, some of the issues we are exploring, and how we're doing it:1: Growing Up In America Now. What is it like? To go from the idyllic and safe American childhoods so many of us had to a vastly more dangerous world. Take Justin [Dave Annable], drug-addled, suffering fr...
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