The Family Way
In business and politics, it’s all relative.
You can’t always believe the buzz.
ABC’s new family saga Brothers & Sisters spent the summer under a cloud of negative speculation, with cast and producer changes keeping the revised pilot sight unseen for months (which is rarely a good sign). The end result is far from a disaster, thankfully, though something less than a triumph.
On the glossy surface, it’s an earnestly predictable but impeccably produced soap opera, with a blue-chip cast of characters as rich and beautiful as they are miserable and mopey, coping with personal and financial intrigues.
If the show breaks any dramatic ground, it’s in the Walker family’s politics, with arguments and conflicts that hit close to home. At the core of the tumult is prodigal daughter Kitty (Calista Flockhart), a right-wing radio pundit returning somewhat petulantly to her California family after years of estrangement in New York.
Her mother (Sally Field) is less welcoming than her CEO sister (Rachel Griffiths), but the whole family seems a bit off. It may have something to do with cash-flow irregularities in the family food business, as well as emotional baggage involving her youngest brother (Dave Annable), a black-sheep war vet with addiction issues.
Will sudden tragedy bond them or drive them further apart? A fair question, but not nearly so nagging and persistent as the justified fear that Brothers & Sisters, though well acted and engrossing, will be less deliciously compatible a companion piece for the frothier suds of Desperate Housewives than Grey’s Anatomy was.
A Wow Warhol
How fortunate for Andy Warhol, the most elusive of pop-art celebrities, to fall under the gaze of documentary artist Ric Burns. His two-part Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (Sept. 20-21, PBS; check listings) is in the best American Masters tradition.
It works as an illuminating biography and as a critical study — though at times, especially where Warhol’s movies are concerned, not critical enough — while also providing a vivid cultural snapshot of the artist’s turbulent times.
Finding fame in his obsession with the famous, Warhol literally went from soup (cans) to nuts (the hangers-on at the Factory) as he pioneered turning pop-culture and commercial iconography into lasting works of art. As an admirer notes, he may have had little talent for narrative, but his life was like a novel. Also like a terrific movie. Which this most definitely is.
