KEY POINTS:
Something is missing from the new American drama Brothers & Sisters, making last night's first episode like the full roast turkey dinner without the cranberries.
The astringent note we've come to expect from the genre in the 21st century was nowhere in evidence. After the more cynical and
inventive takes on suburban American family life served up in Six Feet Under, Weeds, Big Love, and even the tediously ironic soap Desperate House Wives, this show seemed anachronistic, a harking back to the long-retired hugging-and-learning versions of the 70s and 80s.
The Walkers are on the surface an idyllic bunch - mum and dad still in love after all these years and living in the kind of sumptuous, picture-perfect home which brings to mind other ampersand titles, like lifestyle magazine House & Garden. The five grown-up children have their differences but love each other really.
There was tension between daughter Kitty (Calista Flockhart), a right-wing political commentator on radio, and mom (Sally Field), a liberal who's virulently anti-war after seeing the effect a tour of duty in Afghanistan has had on the troubled youngest of her brood.
Kitty's return home to California, lured by a job in television, brought this to a head but, in the best tradition of saccharin American drama, there were tears and tolerance before bedtime - or rather, before dad carked it and crashed into the pool.
That move made comparisons with that other family drama set in California all the more tempting. But whereas dad's death in the first episode of Six Feet Under was the catalyst for an exploration of the Californian penchant for self-empowered lunacy in its many forms, the dark secrets behind the loving family facade in this show are a yawn.
Brothers & Sisters needs to come up with something more creative than dark hints that dad has a mistress and has cooked the books in the family business.
It obviously prides itself on its squabbling family metaphor for the political divisions of an America ruled by the neo-conservatives. But so far, the result is pompous dialogue that belongs in press statements rather than interchanges between family members.
The show has garnered a stellar cast which will make it worth watching if only to see how class actors can rise above a pedestrian script. Sally Field as the warm and angsty matriarch is compelling, despite being lumbered with such leaden lines as, "So isn't this nice? Here we all are. It's been so long."
And Rachel Griffiths, in another coolly intelligent role, brings more warmth to her character Sarah, a woman juggling motherhood, job and extra-marital temptation, than she did to her relentlessly dour Brenda in Six Feet Under.
The men have their work cut out to match the radiance of the women: that Tom Skerritt's character was killed off at the end of the first episode was probably a mercy for an actor who seems forever typecast into playing the craggy patriarch.
The biggest flaw is casting the diminutive Calista Flockhart as defender of Republican America. It's like flaky, lovelorn Ally McBeal deciding George W. Bush is her new man. Flockhart is so scrawny as to be almost painful to watch. In a literal sense, she doesn't have the weight to convince as a media personality able to sway a nation's views.
Another irritant is the show's manipulative soundtrack, which is far more emotive than anything the script has yet to deliver. Still it's early days for the Walker clan. If they stop pontificating in state-of-the-nation-style addresses, cut all that sensitive understanding and pull a surprising skeleton or two out of the closet, perhaps they'll grow on me.