Brothers & Sisters | ABC
Brothers & Sisters
When Monday, 9 PM
On What About Brian, the hero loses his company, his life’s work, and all his money in between two commercial breaks. By the end of the first episode, he’s got a new job working for his estranged father; an episode later, he’s involved in an office romance with some absurdly hot babe who keeps making cryptic references to her married boyfriend–who turns out, an episode later, to be . . . his father. Over the first five or six episodes of Brothers & Sisters, the family business is in trouble, the dead father turns out to have been embezzling, his children discover he had a second family, and the embezzled funds lead to a bizarre land deal that turns out to be fantastically lucrative. Or at least I think it was lucrative–I missed an episode and have been playing catch-up ever since, and the weekly recap of the previous episodes has grown more complicated than a physics exam.
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It’s boring, I suppose–at least in the traditional, slow-moving sense. You have to stick with it to see how these moments gradually add up to something larger, a sense of how history and the outside world are impinging on the village. The picnic is where the eccentric relative demonstrates a shortwave radio for the first time; a kid bicycling around the outskirts of town comes upon a construction crew and they turn out to be building the first autobahn. Then, when people around town suddenly start wearing swastika armbands without anybody else much noticing, you realize just how these small moments can snowball into an avalanche.
