This is Brothers & Sisters. The family is the Walkers, a stolid, vaguely Ewing-like clan of Southern California fruit growers. The brothers and sisters are Sarah (Rachel Griffiths), who’s traded the corporate fast track to work for the family business, and who’s husband won’t touch her; Tommy (Balthazar Getty), a womanizer; Kevin (Matthew Rhys), gay; Justin (Dave Annable), a troubled vet just back from Afghanistan; and Kitty (Calista Flockhart), a right-wing radio firebrand home for the first time in years, considering an offer to host a Crossfire-esque cable show. Dad (Tom Skerritt) is philandering with disaster. Matriarch Nora (Sally Field) is skittishly atop it all. The premier adheres most closely to Kitty, opening with a chain phone call, sister to sister to brother, that introduces the show’s central, well-set mood of painful familial drift and dissociation. As Kitty arrives in L.A., isolation breaks too easily towards eager chumminess. The Walker children do not know each other as well as they could, and feel the loss. But you don’t feel it that acutely — and you don’t feel much of anything else. There are a lot of Walkers written into the script: that goes a little ways towards explaining why none of them, other than Sally Field, stand out in anyway that makes you want to care. There are other reasons. The bland writing is one. The obvious domestic tribulations are another. Then there’s Justin: in theory it would be hard to turn away from a good-kid-turned-rough-edged-veteran-on-the-edge, ruined by a war still underway. Only he’s inexplicably played with the depth of a troubled-teen guest star from a very special episode of Saved by the Bell. Kitty agonizes over her move to TV throughout, pushing up against her mother’s silent disapproval in the process. Nora explodes eventually, and for a second it seems that Brothers & Sisters might be able to right its flat family intrigue with a dose of roiling political discord. It was Kitty who advised Justin to enlist right after 9/11, and she’s always held her and her right-wing views partially responsible for his trauma. And now she’s going to go on TV and spout those opinions to millions of others, and well, well, that’s just fine. A tantalizing insinuation of pugnacious conservatism hangs around Kitty throughout, seemingly daring the plot to tangle with her and start some meaty political fights that lead to revealing emotions. But the insinuation is an empty one. Kitty’s provocative conservatism consists of everyone referring to how conservative she is, and her tossing off a few Reagan references and pointlessly proclaiming, “Yes, I am a conservative…” and “My politics…” Kitty’s character isn’t any more believable than Justin’s. Essentially a brunette Ann Coulter, Flockhart plays it demure. Something about it is amiss, in fact. Creator Jon Robin Baitz insists his waif-y Republican media provocateur isn’t anything like Coulter. She’s “very much in mind with the older parts of the [Republican] party, the sort of Eisenhower Republican, the William Buckley conservative.” Ah, yes, those moderate right-wing radio talk show hosts. They’re all over the dial. Either Brothers & Sisters’ creative team is detached from the political realities they hoped to inject into their show for a bit of much-needed zing, or they wanted to do it in such a way that nobody would be offended. Both would explain the developing conflict over Justin’s service in Afghanistan. For the sake of tension, isn’t there a slightly more contentious Middle East intervention they could be working with? Baitz has given a bit of Kitty’s character arc away in interviews. “Her belief system is challenged… “, he’s said. “And I’m not saying she goes from being a conservative to not being a conservative, because that’s exactly not the case.” (What, so she gets more conservative?) This could get some conservatives upset. There are two reasons it shouldn’t. First, it doesn’t behoove people who claim to abhor identity politics to go around decrying how people like themselves are “represented” on television. Second, Kitty’s character doesn’t have anymore character than a conservative sock puppet. There’s literally nothing there to get upset about. Brothers & Sisters illustrates much more about the nature of television today than it does about adult siblings, or America’s political fault lines. It makes pretty clear why nobody’s doing family dramas anymore. It also hints that there’s still someone in ABC’s production chain who believes that audiences want to see political content in their primetime drama. Last year they tried Commander in Chief. Brothers & Sisters will likely meet the same fate. This is not a vain exercise though. Television arrived at its current, much proclaimed golden age, through a specific spurt of narrative innovation. And Jack Bauer foiling terrorists will not remains satisfying indefinitely. The only way to keep TV good is to keep breaking perfectly good molds.