Love Sick
Sunday's
Brothers & Sisters is a glorious confection, sort of like something that Marcel of the addictive
Top Chef might have made this season - perfectly constructed, a bit exotic and just slightly unhinged. Its subject: The
horrors of romance as Valentine's Day approaches. Its authors: Our youngest writers, two troublemaking boys named
Cliff Olin and Peter Calloway, who are hip beyond their years. (Both writer-boys are hovering at the frightening precipice of their mid-bloody twenties. I would get rid of them, but there's a law against clubbing baby seals.)
Now, some backstory. Valentine's Day began many centuries ago to
commemorate two Christian martyrs named Valentine, but has devolved, like most holy things, into a horrid and syrupy commercial holiday based mostly on the marketing of greeting cards, chocolates with wretched liquor centers, and overly red roses bred to capture the imaginations of gullible last-minute shoppers.
And yet...
Whose heart hasn't skipped a beat upon coming home on Valentine's Day to find the banality of mid-February broken up by flowers and a note sitting on the table, waiting for you? Mine has. Especially when the note is not some pastel-colored, store-bought product, but a lovely handmade expression of real feeling. And that's the rub. We keep looking for it: for romance, for real feeling, for an end to a kind of internal loneliness, which at times
we're simply unaware of. To be human is to be lovesick. We're built to need intimacy, both biologically and spiritually, and for some reason this
truth seems to drive people nuts. We're born crying, needing the arms that catch us and introduce us to the world. God knows that the prospect of dying alone, without someone at our side, is almost too much to bear.
Of course, the need for love, though agonizing, is mostly a comic one, wherein jolting and jarring signals are sent to the brain - which makes people under its thrall behave very oddly. I think the two writers of this episode have brilliantly exploited all that's funny about our clumsy romantic yearning, while somehow also capturing what's sad and impossible about it.
On the subject of lovesickness, I'm still curious about the segment of our
audience that is threatened and outraged by the fact that Kevin Walker is gay, and by his being given the same space in the world of the show as the heterosexuals. I am curious about the level of agitation that drives said viewers to write letters expressing how sick it makes them to see Kevin kiss Chad or Scotty, or to watch a pickup at a bar in the desert. But the culture is moving at its own pace, and it is where it is. I say this with a sigh, hoping that indeed there is a magic rehab for homophobes and even for ad execs selling chocolate bars by appealing to the lowest baseline on the lowest brow.
Anyway, our job at
Brothers & Sisters is to entertain, and to do so while saying, "This is what it's like right now in our world, this is what it
feels like." We're all lovesick - that's why God gave us the impulse to cook, fornicate, laugh and cry. And in the Western world, what we're really
saying is that no matter which boy or girl you want to go home with, no matter who you want to relate to, we're all in the same damn boat. Rowing against the tide, knowing it's easier not to row
alone.
ABC's Brothers & Sisters
airs Sundays at 10 pm/ET.
