Housewives and Sisters: Good Neighbors
While some of us still miss
Grey's Anatomy on Sundays, a perfectly entertaining bit of escapism to charge our batteries for the week ahead, ABC's new
Brothers & Sisters has been growing on me. Week by week, culminating in this Sunday's most enjoyable episode yet, the show has become both lighter in tone and more emotionally compelling, proving to be a suitably compatible companion piece to
Desperate Housewives - which, by sweeps coincidence or not, also enjoyed on Sunday its finest hour since the heights of its first breakthrough season.
Housewives' much-touted supermarket-hostage crisis lives up to its billing, in no small measure thanks to killer performances (in one case literally) by Laurie Metcalf as a deranged wronged wife who takes over her cheating husband's store at gunpoint, and by Felicity Huffman's Lynette, whose final hysterical showdown with the mad Carolyn Grisby in the wake of Nora's fatal shooting (Yay!) was the sort of galvanizing moment we'd long been waiting for.
Though it was no surprise to me (and, I'm sure, to others) that the obnoxious Nora was going to take the fall - a character this horrid deserved no better a fate - the brutal suddenness of her execution was still quite shocking. "She put the moves on your husband. Why didn't you say so?" Carolyn coolly remarks just before plugging the manipulative Nora. As the episode title promised, "Bang" (which also happens to be the title of a relatively obscure Sondheim song, as are most of the show's episode titles). "I believe the phrase you're looking for is, 'Thank you,'" Carolyn said. To which I couldn't help laughing, despite it all.
This
Housewives episode , written by
Joe Keenan (
Frasier), struck that balance between suburban satire, over-the-top humor and high melodrama that eluded the show for much of its second season, and which it still only achieves sporadically in this improved third year. What other show would give you a moment like Bree welcoming people into her home to watch the hostage crisis on TV, with the greeting, "It's just awful. Deviled eggs?" All in all: Bravo.
Ditto to
Brothers & Sisters, which gathered the entire Walker clan (as
Rachel Griffiths' Sarah said, "C'mon guys, we're not the Waltons") and their assorted love interests to the family's Ojai ranch house, where they shared many summers (and where both boys and girls seem to have lost their virginity to a local scoundrel named Tucker Booth) but which is being sold to help avoid bankruptcy. Everyone figured the house would be empty. Everyone was wrong.
The script by
David Marshall Grant and Molly Newman was a nice blend of sexy humor and potent family drama, with many characters coming into sharper focus as the family dealt most notably and heatedly (at the dinner table, natch) with the issue of Tommy's inability to conceive. Tommy wants his gay brother Kevin to be the sperm donor, but Kevin's issues about his sexuality and feelings of otherness make him reluctant. Baby of the family Justin volunteers, but Tommy shuns him for his immaturity and unreliability as a barely recovering addict. The eventual reconciliation was moving, but the initial confrontations were a gas, as Nora (the invaluable
Sally Field) is prompted to blurt, "Is there something special about Kevin's sperm I'm unaware of?" And later: "Of all the madness I have ever witnessed from you, this takes the cake."
A pretty tasty one, too. I'm not sure how many more weeks
Brothers & Sisters can spin out scenarios in which the entire family is thrown together in awkward social situations (the week before involved a fancy charity dinner) to sort out their business. But these last few episodes have helped convince me that ABC is right to give this series a full season to work its kinks out (hiring
Rob Lowe to spice up the life of its least convincing character,
Calista Flockhart's mewling Kitty, is another positive move).
Lately, the prospect of curling up with a
Housewives-
Sisters combo is far more pleasure than chore. (Having been given both of these episodes in advance, I was able to watch CBS's
Cold Case-
Without a Trace combo in real time Sunday night, albeit delayed by another long football overrun, and I find these a strong if sobering alternative for those who shun soaps. With NBC's football in the mix, and the devastating
The Wire and the wonderfully macabre
Dexter on pay cable (the latter getting even better as "the noose is tightening," as Dexter put it last night), there really is something for just about everyone.
