Swinging Sally Field

Last night Brothers & Sisters, ABC's series about a liberal California family who are always up in each other's business, wrapped up its inaugural season. I tried to resist it all year. It's always trying too hard: pushing its jokes, pushing its drama. Everything falls just that side of the line I draw between a grand yarn well told and manipulative storytelling. But more and more I can't push back against its agressive "love me!" behavior. I just do what it tells me to do. I could still do without Balthazar Getty (playing the dullest sibling). I could definitely do without Rob Lowe's Republican Senator character, who has somehow defanged the once sharp counterpoint drama involving the conservative black sheep of the family: Kitty (Calista Flockhart). But minor annoyances aside, the rest of the show is like a drug. It's a perfect Sunday night hit.


I give a huge portion of the credit to Sally Field. She plays Nora, the matriach and widow of the huge Walker clan. She holds all the show's disparate tones together with fluid emotional glue. Remember the climactic funeral scene in Steel Magnolias when this two time Academy Award winner broadly marched through so many notes in quick succession: staccato sobbing, hysterical confusion, slapstick anger, cry-for-help earnestness? Well, Nora gets a little of that action, too. OK a lot. Brothers & Sisters is hyperactively emotional and it swings, often without a net, from laughs to tears. Brothers & Sisters is a real circus and Sally Field is one incredible trapeze artist.