Robbie's Brothers & Sisters Blog

There are moments in this week's episode where everything I think Brothers & Sisters [Sundays at 10 pm/ET, on ABC] should come together perfectly; comedy and tragedy coexist — just like they do in real life, turning, dancing with each other in perpetuity. The episode has it all — male passions run amok, female passions threaten to cause thermonuclear war, farce, drunkenness, sorrow and laughter. In my humble opinion, a great episode.

There are moments of acting in "Grapes of Wrath" that took my breath away when I saw it. One in particular stands out. I don't want to say too much, but it takes place in a kitchen during a showdown between Nora and Holly. Both actresses, Sally Field and Patty Wettig are real and funny and frightening in a way that brings to mind some of the great turns that John Cassavetes managed to capture on film — I'm thinking of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence in particular. The camera comes close in so as to deprive them of any privacy, and the two great actresses clearly have interest only in the moment and the truth it contains. It's delicate, intimate and totally surprising. Anybody who has been in a fight will recognize the admixture of love and rage — and even humor — that go into a true brawl. I will say no more on that subject....

Two of the authors of this week's episode come out of the theater (one of the writers and the director). David Marshall Grant is a playwright. I lured him into writing for B&S around the time I thought we might be picked up. The timing was good; he had just had a production of a new show at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and after five years of working on the thing, he was spent and, like me, wondering, "What now?" You work for years on a play and then that's sort of that. I equate being a playwright to being an arugula farmer whose crop is so odd and peppery that only a few people have much appetite for it. Another story, that. David's first play, Snake Bit, was a gorgeous chamber piece about the entwining strands of mortality, aging, loving and living in Los Angeles. I thought that television would be a hospitable place for him — you know, a break from the gulag of writing plays. It has proven to be a most felicitous marriage. Also, his writing partner on "Grapes of Wrath," Sherri Cooper, has brought a great breezy twist to the writing, a mordantly funny and off-centered take on the assumptions and privileges of the Walkers. At our offices, she often comes to visit me with perfect stories and perfect comic timing; they sometimes involve men, food and affronts to her dignity. She's hilariously wry, and slightly... deadpan. She can be Kitty-like.

Now to the director, also someone I dragged into this mess: Michael Morris. Like David and me, he comes from the theater. An Englishman, he's sort of absurdly good-looking in a schoolboy-goes-to-Paul Smith sort of way, and he's brilliant. And he's married to the prodigiously talented actress Mary McCormack. And about to have a second baby. Michael directed my last play, The Paris Letter, in its world premiere, and he also helped develop this show with me and Ken Olin. We all sat together through the summer and fall of 2005, talking and battling, and I would put something down on paper. Michael was there the whole way, and when we were picked up, he came on as a producer. He has spent a lot of time on the set being a constant, a voice of the show for the guest directors, and a lifeboat for the actors, who trust him implicitly. As do I, as does the studio. He will be directing many more, and he is a genius.

So, there you have it — the Walkers are heading to the end of their first season. The cast is already eager to come back, and the writers are already making plans. We have such plans. A new play, as it were, for 22 weeks each year... for a lot of years.

So, before I talk about this week's episode, I thought I might catch you all up on the goings on at Stages 6 & 7 at Disney. It's been a while since I wrote an episode. Sunday night's "Love is Difficult" (co-written with humor and grace by Ms. Molly Newman) represents my first writing on Brothers & Sisters since "Mistakes Were Made, Pt 1." Also, today I finished co-writing episode 18 with Marc Guggenheim, and Greg Berlanti and I are going to pen the season finale together, which I am looking forward to. His hand is on all the scripts, and I freely acknowledge that we would not be here had it been left to me alone — Greg understands the delicate and sophisticated balance of dark and light, escapism and truth-telling that works here. I honestly believe that my episodes would have been a miasma of angst without his gentle touch, and we'd be off the air. Not that I don't have a sense of humor — I mean, I know my way around a joke — but somehow, I tend to gravitate towards the serious plots when it comes to the Walkers. Berlanti has gently taught this old dog new tricks, or led the horse to water and made him rethink. You know what I mean. Anyhow, he's about to make his own pilot, from a brilliant script by him and Mr. Guggenheim called Eli Stone, which I wager will be on the fall schedule here at ABC. We'll have a little less of him on hand for a bit, and I'll try and carry on the tradition of balance that he's instilled so seamlessly into the fabric of the show.

I find myself deeply embedded in various places in Sunday's episode, drawing from my own biography and my own current state of being, politically, romantically and emotionally. As the creator of a show, you want to be able locate yourself in the heart of the thing, and this episode, "Love is Difficult," is a good example of how that works. The title is from the great German poet Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet. To quote the exact line:

"Love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

Kevin gives Chad a copy of the book, which turns out to be a favorite of Chad's, who is able to quote the passage. A prior scene was cut (as the script was too long), in which Kitty and Kevin wander around a bookstore while Kitty accuses Kevin, who is looking for a copy of the Rilke book, of using literature to test whether or not Chad is worthy of him. Kevin is sort of — of all the people on the show — frighteningly like me: skittish, romantic, screwed up, afraid of intimacy and deeply in need of it. Yeah. Me. A few years ago, I went out with a sort of aging supermodel-boy, who was not dissimilar to Chad, though he was far, far crazier. (He told me once that he thought he might be the re-incarnation of Jesus. Our last date.) My ego was bolstered by the beauty factor, and I've tried to damn Kevin with the same egocentric weakness I experienced by being with someone absurdly beautiful. What can I say? We try and grow.

Another important storyline this week involves Sarah and Joe's visits to a marriage counselor, which are also drawn very much from my own experience. I would go once a week with the person I loved up to this shrink's office, and we would try and sort out why were in trouble, even though — like Sarah and Joe — we loved each other with all our hearts. I think those scenes, with the great and quiet Joel Grey as the therapist, will ring very true to anyone who has been to couple's counseling. There's yearning and frustration mixed with the desire to protect your loved one and get out of the room in one piece. In my case, after the session ended, my mate and I would stand on the street, spent, wounded, exhausted, but usually relieved and able to joke about it. We are no longer together, but we are best friends, still family, so I can't say that it didn't work. I drew on the energy I recalled in the therapist's office and tried to recreate that. And it was good to have Mr. Grey here. He's an old friend, also family, and I think it's likely that we'll see more of him. The character is based on another shrink of mine, now deceased, who quietly probed, and quietly enquired of me, without ever offering concrete plans and advice. I would rage at him, looking for guidance and easy solutions to impossible problems.

Another area of the show I find myself drawn to is the shifting political landscape as we come up on the first moments in a very long election campaign. I was brought up in a fiercely lefty household, and yet, I find myself questioning my own deeply-felt progressive inclinations, especially in the post-9/11 world. And so, Kitty's involvement with conservatism, and a conservative presidential candidate (more Giuliani than McCain, truth be told), is also close to my heart and a way of exploring my own confusion and changing priorities.

Finally, in this episode, Nora starts to explore her future — not as a mom — but as a woman, a human being, an individual in the world who has to rethink the strictures of her role as mother and widow. Right before Sept. 11, 2001, my own dad passed away, and that's all over the show too — like William Walker, he was in the food business, and a quiet, powerful patriarch, who left a hole in his wake. And Nora's grief has a lot in common with that of my mother's at times. But that's life. If she feels I've borrowed, she doesn't mind. She knows I love her. But I'll tell you one thing; if I have kids, I will so not let them become writers. Because writers invade your privacy and then tell you they love you.

Sunday's Brothers & Sisters is a glorious confection, sort of like something that Marcel of the addictive Top Chef might have made this season — perfectly constructed, a bit exotic and just slightly unhinged. Its subject: The
horrors of romance as Valentine's Day approaches. Its authors: Our youngest writers, two troublemaking boys named Cliff Olin and Peter Calloway, who are hip beyond their years. (Both writer-boys are hovering at the frightening precipice of their mid-bloody twenties. I would get rid of them, but there's a law against clubbing baby seals.)

Now, some backstory. Valentine's Day began many centuries ago to
commemorate two Christian martyrs named Valentine, but has devolved, like most holy things, into a horrid and syrupy commercial holiday based mostly on the marketing of greeting cards, chocolates with wretched liquor centers, and overly red roses bred to capture the imaginations of gullible last-minute shoppers.

And yet...

Whose heart hasn't skipped a beat upon coming home on Valentine's Day to find the banality of mid-February broken up by flowers and a note sitting on the table, waiting for you? Mine has. Especially when the note is not some pastel-colored, store-bought product, but a lovely handmade expression of real feeling. And that's the rub. We keep looking for it: for romance, for real feeling, for an end to a kind of internal loneliness, which at times
we're simply unaware of. To be human is to be lovesick. We're built to need intimacy, both biologically and spiritually, and for some reason this
truth seems to drive people nuts. We're born crying, needing the arms that catch us and introduce us to the world. God knows that the prospect of dying alone, without someone at our side, is almost too much to bear.

Of course, the need for love, though agonizing, is mostly a comic one, wherein jolting and jarring signals are sent to the brain — which makes people under its thrall behave very oddly. I think the two writers of this episode have brilliantly exploited all that's funny about our clumsy romantic yearning, while somehow also capturing what's sad and impossible about it.

On the subject of lovesickness, I'm still curious about the segment of our
audience that is threatened and outraged by the fact that Kevin Walker is gay, and by his being given the same space in the world of the show as the heterosexuals. I am curious about the level of agitation that drives said viewers to write letters expressing how sick it makes them to see Kevin kiss Chad or Scotty, or to watch a pickup at a bar in the desert. But the culture is moving at its own pace, and it is where it is. I say this with a sigh, hoping that indeed there is a magic rehab for homophobes and even for ad execs selling chocolate bars by appealing to the lowest baseline on the lowest brow.

Anyway, our job at Brothers & Sisters is to entertain, and to do so while saying, "This is what it's like right now in our world, this is what it
feels like." We're all lovesick — that's why God gave us the impulse to cook, fornicate, laugh and cry. And in the Western world, what we're really
saying is that no matter which boy or girl you want to go home with, no matter who you want to relate to, we're all in the same damn boat. Rowing against the tide, knowing it's easier not to row alone.

ABC's Brothers & Sisters airs Sundays at 10 pm/ET.

So. Hi. Happy 2007. Been a while since I've posted on the inner workings of Brothers & Sisters [Sundays at 10 pm/ET, on ABC], the oddly popular serio-comic series of which I am the titular creator. We're closing in on the home stretch of our first season here, with six more episodes to write and nine more to shoot. (ABC ordered an extra three episodes, to make up for having never aired the original pilot and scrapping an episode early on, so that instead of a back nine, we have a back 12.)

And where are we headed for the remainder of the season?

Kitty Walker's relationship with Senator McAllister will deepen and prove more challenging, more public, more difficult. Now that we signed the absurdly talented Rob Lowe as a special guest star, McAllister will be given a much bigger outline in the life of the Walkers — and indeed the political life of the country. His ambitions to higher office will thrust the family into an uncomfortably public light, and Kitty will be forced to deal with the reality of loving a politician — one who happens to be a tactical genius, as well as both moral and ruthlessly driven.

Sarah and Joe's marriage will get rockier still. The fact that their individual lives are very different, and that they find themselves growing farther apart will be a source of real pain between two people who love each other. We will deal more with their attempts to repair and reconnect while they face a new burden: the knowledge of the effects an unhappy marriage has on the children. Two good people in crisis; a very familiar problem. Sarah's work life and her ambitions in the world are more and more in conflict with what it means to be a conventional wife and working mom, and those issues will prove impossible to resolve quickly and easily. The writers of Brothers & Sisters have all had tumultuous inner lives, complex love lives, as has just about anybody over thirty who lives with the scars of heartbreak just below the surface.

Tommy and Julia are at a different place in their marriage — trying to start a family, Tommy is also trying to start a new business, one in which he will have a new independence from the family. For the remainder of the season, Tommy will try to put his own ambitions and dreams ahead of simply being in service to Ojai Foods. He and Julia will also deal with a complicated pregnancy, and how frightening that can be.

Kevin Walker, about whom we get somany letters, will continue to enrage TV-viewing homophobes who seem to yearn for the blandly conforming 1950s, when being gay was, to most of America, a shameful and terrible secret. He will also continue to search for love and intimacy like any other member of the Walker tribe, regardless of sexual orientation. He will continue to be drawn to beauty, both inner and outer, and will continue to be essentially confused and lonely, and uncertain about what he wants.

And Justin Walker will face the ticking clock of having to go back to the army, and to serve in the Middle East. Like many young Americans, he will confront the differential between his abundant courage, his fierce patriotism and the possibility of dying for a cause that seems muddled and lost, and far from the reasons he signed up in the first place, right after September 11, 2001. As the series progresses, the war will play a bigger part, as it must in all of our lives, for it is inescapable — it is an intractable part of the American future, and we must and shall discuss it.

And Nora, our matriarch — her battle will be learning to define herself outside of the marriage that identified her for forty some years. How to individuate, how to not simply be trapped in her role as The Mom. (Though she is a great one, yes, it's true. Funny, intrusive, over-involved, baffled and hip, Nora Walker is a perfect dichotomy — the great mom for our times, an American woman of a certain age, growing older and unafraid to be herself, without the plasticizing benefits of botox beloved by so many desperate housewives in the world today.) Nora is a feminist with a heart, no ideologue, but a humanist — our President Bartlett. I think that her romantic life will take a step closer to the foreground, because even though it's OK to be alone, she deserves to be held at night as much as you or I do.

So, in other words, the show must deepen and become richer, become more real, funnier, and braver. And now that, to quote a dear friend, it's clear that "You like us, you really like us", there's no reason that we can't go deep into the heart of the matter: what it's like to have a family, a life, a soul in America right now.

Okay, so I’m going to take a different tack today with the blog. I’m going to try and share what I think about when I dream of Brothers & Sisters -- how it can reflect the country we live in now and serve as a dramatic discussion of American values. We all heard the news that ex-athlete and killer – see civil court conviction – O.J. Simpson has sold a book called If I Did It. And that Rupert Murdoch’s Regan Books is publishing the thing, which seems to be a kind of stunt-like game of literary and legal peek-a-boo. Not only that, Murdoch’s Fox Network is making it into a TV show. It’s all contemptible, of course. Assumes the worst of audiences and readers. Assumes that the populace is so numb that it requires the frisson of cheap titillation the way heroin addicts need their fix.

So, what does this have to do with Brothers & Sisters? A lot, actually, in that it begs an examination of our choices and the kind of moral universe we live in. It points to a collapse of a fundamental goodness – the kind of decency that makes a society function, the kind that is necessary if you want honor in it. On CNN, legal analyst Jeff Toobin pointed out (in his own words) that there was something avaricious, pernicious and coarsening in the amorality of Murdoch and Regan’s choice. That all the other networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and so on – had turned the thing down flat is good news, of course, given the cynical state of showbiz infotainment. But even with our relentlessly diminishing expectations, the marriage between O.J. and Murdoch feels like a new low. All of which, I believe, makes our show worthy of your trust, like a real family.

The people who make Brothers & Sisters, including the crew, which works harder than anyone, have formed a bond. We all believe in what holds us together: family…listening to each other…teaching our children the importance of manners, and of kindness. We all think about how our actions affect the climate we live in. We all believe that the show is in some respects, a prayer for a nation that behaves kindly and compassionately and doesn’t discriminate, and protects its own. This is not the America of Murdoch’s bottom-line sensationalism. Brothers & Sisters is just a TV show, but it works because it’s about the glue that holds us together – love and respect.

Let me tell you where I see it at work; I see it in the gaffers who work for hours and hours, in the electricians on the set, the sound crew, and the camera department. I see in their faces, the best of all of us; people who want their children’s world to be a better one, and who believe in hard work and team work. I see it in the actors, who approach this modest proposal of a show with grace and passion, and I see it in the writers. The people who work in Hair and make up and post production. I want all them to feel proprietary about it; that they own a piece of it. And to know that what we make is not a black hole in our culture, but a modest exploration of what makes America great and where we need to be better.

Things are smooth now at the studio. We have wonderful new writers starting work. Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim’s conclusion to last week’s "Mistakes were Made" airs this Sunday. Ken Olin directed it as only he can, with a deep sensitivity to nuance and detail and feeling. After you see it, I hope you’ll understand why I wrote today’s blog. I’m proud that I co-authored the first part of this two-parter, and that ABC and Touchstone are encouraging us to realize our ambitions, to talk about our life and times without shying away from the hard parts. We want Brothers & Sisters to be brave in the way Edward R. Murrow urged television to be in his famous "Box of Lights and Wires" speech, and the way that Norman Lear was brave when he gave us the Bunker Family, which he did with laughter and drama in equal parts. Those are our ambitions; we regard them as responsibilities. Thirteen million people tune in every Sunday night. They deserve the smartest, least condescending, most entertaining and searching hour of television we can give them.

After all, it’s Sunday night, the workweek is hours away, and our lives are filled with challenges and choices. Life has never moved faster or been more fraught with contradiction. There are political liars on all sides, a shattering war, environmental dangers and corporate scandals all around. Audiences deserve more than the bottom-feeding parlor games of killers – both corporate and literal – that are out to make a buck by polluting our collective soul.

Dateline: Venice, California. Some ruthless bug has totally sidelined me. Symptoms include fever and coughing, paranoia and lassitude. Not wishing to become the Typhoid Mary of Brothers & Sisters, I have banished myself to home, and I am going quietly mad in my exile. What is the evil genius, Dr. [Greg] Berlanti cooking up in my absence? Is Balthazar Getty running naked through the hallways? Is Ron Rifkin trying to seize control of the whole show? Will Touchstone fire me and have my house burned down? Has ABC kidnapped my dog Trip and put him on Dancing with the Stars? All these fears and I've only been out of the office for two days. The idle time has given me room, however, to daydream about where the show is headed, some of the issues we are exploring, and how we're doing it:

1: Growing Up In America Now. What is it like? To go from the idyllic and safe American childhoods so many of us had to a vastly more dangerous world. Take Justin [Dave Annable], drug-addled, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Afghanistan. He has lost himself within a false and impossible perpetual youth, living a Californian golden boy's dream gone bad. I see such potential in him, so much humanity and goodness ahead. But in order to have a future, he's going to have to go on what in Latin is called a Hegira — a flight to escape danger — and he will learn that this flight is as much an internal journey as it is external. In this Sunday's episode [10 pm/ET, on ABC], the first half of a two-parter entitled "Mistakes were Made" (Part 1 was written by Craig Wright and myself, 2 by Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim), we explore the aftermath of September 11, and how that day affected the Walkers. The day when everything changed for all Americans, whether we recognize it or not. A day when young Americans had to begin to grow up, to accept that our lives are political, there is no escaping that, and to look within, to shake off the luxury of merely being part of a distracted consumerist generation.

2: Money and Privilege in America Today. The Walkers have been blessed. I often say that the show is about a family that "had too many blessings, and has now lost them, and has to get them back." Nora has pretty much articulated this line. One of the factors that makes me nervous about the show is all that luxury. I don't want it to be just a wet-dream of lifestyle, big rooms and good taste. In order for the show to resonate, there has to be some challenge to the comfort of the Walkers. And so the story of the business is in some respects the story of corporate malfeasance and its effects on all of us. The company must survive, not just for the wellbeing of the Walkers, but for the people who depend on Ojai Foods for their livelihood, their pensions, their children's college funds and their health insurance. Perhaps most important, they depend on the company as their proxy for the American belief system &mdash in which hard work is rewarded.

The Ojai Foods story is supposed to be fun and complex and mysterious, but it's also informed by my awareness of the effects of the Enron, Adelphia and Worldcom scandals on innocent, hardworking by-standers. Hopefully the company will come through its troubles intact, but in America today, we just don't know. I find it interesting to write about money and how it causes trouble in a manner unlike anything else. Expect big battles and struggles at Ojai Foods, expect power grabs and deception.

3: Finally, Brothers & Sisters is about how we define and redefine family today. Expect us to go deeper into exploring the re-invention of the American family in the 21st century. Divorce in America is rampant. It's hard to love and to be loved; the available list of distractions grows exponentially every day. You can watch TV, become a sex addict, drink, be a workaholic or a celibate monk. But Brothers & Sisters proposes that there is great comfort and safety to be found in the warm embrace of a family, the place where you are known, and finally, where you are accepted and forgiven — where you are loved. The betrayals exist. And so does the love. Someone is gay and that is simply part of the fact of who they are, not a scarlet letter or source of shame; someone is a favorite child, someone is not, but they all battle their limitations and learn from one another. They come together. They laugh. They fight. And they love. As the great poet W.H. Auden wrote, "We must love one another and die." And that's what the show is about; none of us live forever, and the only thing we can control is how we lived, and how we loved.

We at Brothers & Sisters are deeply grateful that audiences are watching and growing every week. We knew there was a place for what we do. The show can be funny, it can be emotional, but we are committed to never condescending to our audience, and never underestimating the intelligence and generosity of that audience. We think we're going to be around for a long time, and that the Walkers' journey mirrors our own in this new and exhilarating, frustrating century.

P.S. Just got back to the office. Nobody even missed me.

He has lines on his face, mostly around the eyes, but he's still almost
comically handsome. More so, given the absence of post-teen heart-throb vapidity. The lines help. They humanize. They seem earned. The mark of a grownup. The battle scars of life. The smile is vivid, and slightly knowing. It is the smile of someone with a lot of experience being in the public eye, someone who knows all the punchlines but still loves the jokes.

I am talking about Rob Lowe, who is joining the cast of Brothers &
Sisters [Sundays at 10 pm/ET, on ABC] this week, following an arduous and elaborate courting ritual which required forbearance and good intentions from all parties. Everyone — Rob, agents, producers, studio and network execs — wanted to happen. So it did. He's sitting in my office. It's me, [show runner Greg] Berlanti and [executive producer Ken] Olin, telling him about the part. The part, as written by Mr. Berlanti and Mr. Guggenheim, is tailored for Rob like a very good Paul Smith suit. Rob is listening, he is avid, eager, and he understands that there could be a great place for him here. A home.

The meeting is a great one. Berlanti, Olin and Lowe are all happy, I'm
right there with them - and why shouldn't we be? Greg's script, which he co-wrote with consulting producer Mark Guggenheim, is wonderful - smart, funny and mercurial in that Berlanti way. Ken is directing; he and Rob go back to when Ken directed The West Wing, and we get an hour of stories from that show. We all love Aaron. Laughter. Rob goes. And then there is the deal, which would be unseemly of me to discuss. In the car that night, driving home, I am thinking of Rob, watching him closely in my mind. Now he has matured and is entering his second act, the best act for an actor — at least until the third act, when you get to be King Lear or Paul Newman or someone who does little character turns and wins Oscars and stuff. That is, if you've earned your place.

(A side thought: Actors should not be allowed access to Faustian Beverly Hills plastic surgeons with scalpels and whispered promises of eternal youth. Men lose their credibility. Cowboys don't do botox. Rob is letting his face happen, eager to change the topography from pretty boy to man.)

What I know about him is this: a good father, around for his kids, he
coaches his son's football team. When he talks about them, which he
does a lot, it is with quiet delight and real pride. He's lived hard, been through a lot, most of it in public, and is smart and forgiving of himself and of others. The Midwestern good manners endure. On The West Wing, his comic timing was exquisite, a throwback to Wilder and Lubitch-style acting. He brings to mind Cooper, as in Gary, and if you're Brothers & Sisters, you know that you want him in that firmament of stars.

Rob's character: a junior Republican senator from California, with higher aspirations. He's going through a messy divorce, in public. He's iconoclastic — a GOP Bullworth without the psychosis. A truth-teller, an ex-military officer, an old-style American conservative with a progressive sense of social issues. Senator McAlister. A believer in a responsible, powerful and mighty America — a great America. He also likes martinis, road movies, honest men, smart women, and most dogs. He and Kitty Walker have an appointment. But I will not give it away, despite the urging of TV Guide's crooning editors.

Rob and I have wanted to work together for a long time, but the opportunity has been denied us. Until now. This is the great thing about this show: All the actors we've worked with and come to know over the years, many from the theatre, we can now find places for them to shine and do what they do best. Greg has already brought us the great Treat Williams....

Who's next? We're already talking about it.

By the way, have I mentioned that making television is the hardest, most frustrating, most painful creative experience I have ever had? And that's on the good days.

A quick word on this Sunday's show: Molly Newman and David Marshall Grant, who wrote "Date Night" (from two weeks ago), also wrote this. It's stunning, and funny, and real, and beautifully directed by Larry Trilling. The way it works is this; Berlanti sits with the writers, and they hash out the story. Sometimes I try and participate. (I can confuse the issues and go off on tangents, so I am occasionally banned.) You can see Greg's hand at work, even when his name is not on a script. Something masterful and fluid, and highly trustworthy hidden under the surface. (Whereas I tend to work from accident and chaos, he lives in order and logic.) The episode takes place mostly at the family's summer ranch in Ojai, where a modest proposal is made. Or a reasonable imitation of Ojai. In Hollywood nothing is as it seems, but things look good. As the great Ernst Lubitch said, "I've been to Paris, France, and Paris, Paramount, and Paris, Paramount is better." It's a great episode, a product of a great collaboration, which is what Brothers & Sisters is all about.

See you next week, when we'll discuss the election, and sex.

My point of view about working in television will always be that of a playwright — a person who still lives and works in New York, in the theatre, an outsider entering a strange world.

I am learning something about fear here in television land. There is no more powerful force at work in how networks decide what shows live and die. In television, fear translates to numbers, either in terms of viewership or bucks. The network execs claim that the marketplace — in other words, the Nielsen ratings — tell the whole story of a show. They may not truly even believe that, but the economics force them to act as though they do. The morning after the show airs, we get our report card, as does every other new show on television. I still don't know what the damn ratings mean — the Monday-morning numbers feel like tea leaves to me, read by psychics and seers and then examined as holy writ and reported dutifully in the press. I'm a playwright, not a psychic.

Nevertheless, I am rather interested in the health of Brothers &
Sisters [Sundays at 10 pm/ET, on ABC], so as soon as I glean that the oracle has spoken, I ask my more savvy partners for the bottom line: "What did it say? Is the news good, bad, or fair?" Because it sets the mood here at Brothers & Sisters for the whole week. It informs the way in which the network acts towards us, and how they regard our efforts. Will the executives try and push us away from going deeper into the emotional and psychological lives of our family, or will they trust us to tell the stories we're telling, and do so with open hearts and minds? So far, the tension between the show and the executives has been a good one, filled with respect and balance and aspiration. We all know it could turn, of course, but so far from our ABC partners, there is a subtle kind of trust — tempered by the ever-present fear, of course, that we'll blow it with that Baitzian theatrical angst or something. That can't happen, actually, because I am a happy man, about to turn 45, who sees the cup as half-full, and who knows that the better parts of life are beautiful and worth celebrating and sharing in the stories we tell. That balance is everything, and this show is about that balance between pleasure and pain and joy and sorrow.

I am writing from a place of vague melancholy today because I know that my friend Aaron Sorkin's show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, is struggling in terms of those numbers. And I also know that his is a show that celebrates intelligence and imagination, and is about America today as much as it is about television comedy writers. And I think it's worth watching and celebrating. Just to have Aaron's work on the air should be enough. I am hoping that Studio 60 sticks around and grows into itself, and that the executives who decide these things are willing to let it do just that. Television that does not condescend (at least on the old networks) is rare. So it scares me to see what's happening to Studio 60, because it could just as easily be us next week.

To me — again, a mere playwright — if you look only at the numbers, you'll never see the whole picture. You can drown in the numbers here in Burbank. "Eighteen-to-39-year-olds watched for 20 minutes but then some of the men left, and we don't know why." Maybe we need a more active opening act? Maybe it needs more sex? I don't know. I am too new at this to dismiss or even really comment on the real meaning of all the numbers. But I know this about the polling: You'll never see the real story of American audiences who have found on television what people used to go to the theatre for: social conscience, laughs, anger and gorgeous writing amidst the mind-numbing dreck. Audiences made up of people who work hard and want to see stories that somehow relate to their own lives; that remind them of how politics and personal lives intersect in every respect. The numbers don't show the emotion; they show who tuned in and who tuned out. But it takes a while, doesn't it? Seinfeld only became a hit in the second season; it was a slow burn, and then it lit up. Some things take patience, and fear will obviate the patience of the executives in a heartbeat.

Maybe the secret to life in television is that in order to make something bold and good you have to be willing to walk away from the job at any moment. It's so easy to compromise in the wrong way that if you want success in TV too desperately, you might lose what makes you unique. So I've vowed not to take the wisdom of the numbers too closely to heart. I see the fear all around me here in television land. I am going to bet on the slow burn, the word of mouth, the thoughtful audience with the warm, beating heart.

Network television needs long shots. We have great actors and writers in this country, and we have audiences hungry for real stories, and I think those audiences are patient and willing. I think ours might be such an audience.

It is the first day shooting episode 8 – first shot, 11 am – and I am writing from the set.

A great mood here at "Brothers & Sisters" in the wake of being picked up for a back nine, or ten or eleven, depending on whom you ask. When the executives told us, I felt like we had a full term in office. Our show, the little candidate, like Clinton after New Hampshire, was elected. Driving home on Monday night, after we heard, I felt like I could finally rest a little, and relax. For a moment. But the news dovetails nicely with the ambition of the episode we're shooting – a more emotional, deeper palate for us – a little advance by "Brothers & Sisters" into deeper waters. Now that we know we are here for a while, we are getting bolder. The network and studio seem thrilled.

Rachel Griffiths is shooting a scene with Tyler Posey, who plays Sarah's stepson, Gabriel. A tough scene in which the 14-year-old's sense of being on the outside of the family looking in comes out, and Sarah has to assure him, "Even though I'm not your mother, you are my son." There is connection, and also for Sarah, an epiphany hidden in the scene. She figures something important out about her dad, which leads to the peeling back of an important layer of the mystery surrounding Ojai Foods' faltering, Byzantine finances.

(Rachel has just finished a good take and is now peering over my shoulder, reading this – telling me that it is SO not a tough scene, etc…and she goes on and on trying to make me feel great, saying, "It's the best scene I have ever played." We laugh, I tell her to shut up and go back to work.)

We are on a brand new set – Gabriel's bedroom, which is brilliantly teenage and warmly secluded at the top of the Whedon home. I want to move there. I actually would love to be part of this family, where they all talk and fight and relate. Rachel has lots of good questions today, little line changes that make things better. As the co-writer of the episode (with Craig Wright), I am trying to be helpful without stepping on the feet of the director, a funny, easy pro named Michael Lange. I hang back, because you want the actors to relate to the guy who is running the set. But I'm here and it's nice to be away from my office and to be around actors. And their fabulous nonsense.

To set the scene on the stage: Todd, the production assistant with the lip piercing, is wearing sunglasses that might have been scrounged from David Bowie's tour trailer circa Ziggy Stardust. It gives the set an air of seventies glam casual. Crew members on apple crates, quietly watch the scene. There is an air of contentedness. Of relaxed ease. This is a smaller crew, because the First Unit is stll on location, finishing the seventh episode. Michael Morris, our producer, is quietly conferring with me and the director about the intention of the scene. He comes from the theatre too, a director – he did my last play, "The Paris Letter," and he used to run the Old Vic in London. He's indispensable, and the actors trust him more than anyone here. Except for me of course.

(Rachel just finished the scene, ran up and kissed me, her eyes filled and limpid. I love actors. Most of my friends are actors. They live large and tell jokes, they love to eat and talk and are unafraid of emotion. They are not businessmen; they are gypsies and bohemians, and they never bore me, ever, ever.)

Now we're changing angles, and so the crew is moving their stuff around, relighting. I am waiting for Craig Wright to get here from home. He is my collaborator so far. We have written four episodes together. Like me, he is a playwright, though he has more TV experience and so I defer to him. But he makes me laugh endlessly, and he's wildly smart and sly. A subversive boy who is really a man, a married one with a great wife and 17-year-old son, Craig wrote for "Six Feet Under" before coming here. He's become a brother. We go for drinks sometimes in the middle of the day. Lunch with wine. He'll come to my house and we'll have expensive European sausage and open a bottle of wine, and write. I love his work, and I'm proud of him. He is moody in a way that I appreciate.

A note on this Sunday's episode, "Date Night." Written by Molly Newman and David Marshall Grant, two playwrights. David, also an actor, is one of my best friends. One of my oldest. (Back in the eighties we went out for a while too. I was too immature.) The happiest part of getting this show on is being able to have these great writers as part of the team. David never did TV before. He's become a star. He and Molly have found a great little thing – they're working on their second episode, and I am going to write the eleventh one with him. Oy. But Sunday's episode is funny, gorgeous, lush and alive. They did it, I just watched, and smiled.

I love television! I am on a big stage on a crazy lot, with shrubbery shaped like Goofy and various other characters. There are many surprises in store, and I will dole them out on a need to know basis. Lots of drama to come. Big announcements. A show.

Thank you.

Greg Berlanti, our showrunner at Brothers & Sisters [Sundays at 10 pm/ET, on ABC], was supposed to write today's blog. But Greg is terribly busy breaking the ninth episode, which is the second part of a two-parter — the first part, our eighth episode, having just been written by Craig Wright and myself. Both are bold episodes in which the politics and personal lives of the family entwine, as we envisioned they would when we conceived the show. There are flashbacks. That's all I can say right now, except that the flashbacks reveal some of the back-story – and break open the family mythology.

There is a sense at Brothers & Sisters of now being able to reach
further in our ambitions for the show — this unique mixture of comedy and drama playing off each other from beat to beat in the blink of an eye — and a sense of being able to change temperature quickly and suddenly. To tell truths and allow our characters to bare the secrets they usually keep hidden just to make it through the day. [Executive producer] Ken Olin, Greg and I are feeling more empowered. Somewhat more trusted by the network — thank god, we earned that! — because they're encouraged by viewers' enthusiasm for the show. It's all very gratifying, to say the least.

In any case, I look forward to Greg's entries to this blog. He has
taught me so much about how to make television and has such generosity and true goodness at the core of his genius — I am quite enthusiastic about you getting to know him a little. Greg brings wit and integrity, along with an old-school, uncompromising grand passion, to the work he does. Craig Wright and I joke that he reminds us of the legendary Hollywood mogul, Irving Thalberg, but he's also equal parts Cuomo, RFK and Goldwater. He moves fast and he knows more than he even knows. Watching him at work, I am reminded that the best minds in our country seem to no longer run for office - they are in business, art, education, technology and science, fields where it's possible to really have an effect on the culture. (I'm thinking off the bat of Barry Diller, the Google boys, of Bill Moyers, Marian Wright Edelman, even Bill Gates and his philanthropic endeavors.)

Anyway... this Sunday's episode, "Family Portrait," is gorgeously directed by my other very vivid and hilarious partner, Ken Olin. Ken has this actor thing, this great lack of pretension about him, which is so comforting on the set. He brings out the dark little demonic brilliance that all good actors try to project, and he makes them feel safe while doing it. He has set the tone for the show — capturing the nuances of life in the big scenes, knowing how to let the camera find a twitch, a secret glance, and a dashed hope, or to find the humor that runs through our family. There are so many actors to bring together in these scenes, but Ken has already found the lush visual language that supports the narrative drive.

"Family Portrait" is a perfect example of how collaboration yields a
story, which is then put through another series of collaborative processes until it becomes a television show. First, Craig Wright and Berlanti and I sat in a room, talking it through. Then Craig and I wrote the script and hand it to Ken to direct. Before we shot a frame, though, we all sat down for the cast read-through, where the actors get together one day at lunch and, well, read through the next episode. It's not fun, and it's not relaxing for the writers or the actors, but it bonds us as a family, which is what we are. A big table. A Thursday afternoon. Calista [Flockhart] and Sally [Field] sparring, Rachel [Griffiths] projecting her character's frustration and grace, Ron Rifkin bringing his sorrow, anger and joy to the table, Dave Annable discovering his strength, Matthew Rhys savoring his sly plumy wit, and Balthazar [Getty] his power.... Ken Olin with pen in hand making notes in the margin, and me not believing that this is where we are. I catch the eye of my collaborator, Craig Wright. A little nod from him, meaning, "OK, not so bad." An antic and very brief grin from Mr. Berlanti.

And it's over, forty some minutes later, the first read-through, but the work on the show has just started. There's a long way to go before it gets to the audience, which is also becoming part of the family. Everybody is getting to know everybody else, and it feels good.

I am going to write today about what it takes to get a show on the air. I am a playwright, and one with virtually no experience in television. But I have entered a new world, and I am no longer who I was. I used to be a New York bohemian art-boy, one who grew up working in the not-for-profit theater, which is as far removed from the passionate fear-driven chaos of network television as can be imagined. I would read, swim, write a little, or a lot, and own my day. That changed when I was invited to try my hand at creating a TV show in July 2005. I had worried that the audience for my plays was aging and dismayingly white and limited to those fortunate New Yorkers who could afford the price of a ticket, which is anywhere from $40 to $75 a pop Off-Broadway. The theater was starting to feel like opera to me: rarified and beautiful, but like Venice, sinking into the sea. So when Ken Olin offered me the chance to try a TV show, I took a breath, left Sag Harbor, New York, and came out to L.A., my original hometown.

Two weeks ago, Brothers & Sisters went on the air. The premiere followed a year of writing, rewriting, shooting two versions of the pilot, recasting and navigating the hazing process known as “development.” (That means notes from executives upon notes from more executives, and more notes from more executives — all of whom have other shows, other constituencies and other problems to think about.) It followed a year of rage and joy in equal measure, and of honoring my decision never to give up, and never to back away from the fight to get the show on. The fight has changed me for the better, I believe. I needed to know one thing if the show failed — I needed to know that I had done everything I could to make it work, that there was nothing left for me, and that I had not flinched, had been a grown-up and had fought for what I believed in in the way a politician fights for election to high office.

For years as a child, I never even had a television, because my family left California and lived in South Africa, where there were none, and where, when TV finally arrived in the mid ‘70s, the programming was limited to lugubrious Dutch Reform church services, creaky old British soaps set in industrial towns, and dubious, canceled American detective shows featuring middling crime solvers. Or, at the golf club my parents belonged to, there would be 16-millimeter copies of SWAT or Mannix or something about a blind detective, shows projected on to white sheets on African terraces for boozy golfers.

It never occurred to me to become a television writer; I was a playwright. I had never paid attention to the medium, and so my learning curve has been — well, picture the north face of Everest. The transition from mounting a play in New York once every couple of years to putting on a large ensemble drama for a gigantic network week after week is exhilarating and harrowing. This is what I’ve learned so far from the process: Every day, admit you don’t know what you’re doing, but do not apologize for it. And that’s it. Write well, write quickly, write shorter scenes. And don’t forget why you’re there.

I’ll tell you why I’m here: I believe in the story we’re trying to tell — that of an American family who loses its blessings and tries to reclaim them. I believe in the face of Sally Field, which carries her experience and her age with pride, undeniable light and fierce intelligence. I love seeing an American woman over 40 who has not succumbed to the temptations of altering her features. I believe in the power of women, the women in our show, and their sensitivity and pride. I believe in Rachel Griffiths and the way she brings confusion, gentleness and bravery to her character, and I believe in Calista Flockhart, and her mercurial, evasive essaying of Kitty Walker, a woman who has had to face life in a new way, in which her decisions have real consequences, in which the shield of politics and ideology can no longer protect her. I believe in the Walker family as Americans struggling to hold on to their ideals and struggling to love one another, or risk losing the delicate, invisible web of interconnection that sustains them. I believe in boys trying to be men, and in men trying to do the right thing. I believe in a large ensemble cast, and collaborating with my partners Ken Olin and Greg Berlanti, and writers Craig Wright, Molly Newman, David Marshall Grant and Jessica Mecklenburg, who have written the episodes so far. I believe in the young staff writers who are about to go to bat.

And I believe in an avid, hungry audience who could see the possibilities in these characters; their love, their flaws and the bonds that can’t be broken, despite the conflicts between them about money, power, sex and politics. I said yes to television when I realized that I had to try to understand what holds this country together, during a time of war and economic disparity and red-state/blue-state mistrust and rage. I thought that a television show could talk about that, and if it worked, if it was funny and real, there would be a place for it. I hope I’m right. The response to the first few episodes offers hope that I am.

When Greg Berlanti joined the show, the two of us went on a walk around the lot. He knew we were labeled the “troubled show” without having yet aired, and that we were under scrutiny from the press because of the high-profile cast and the departure of his predecessor, Marti Noxon. He knew how exhausted I was; we had become friends almost instantly. So we walked around the lot and he gave me some advice. “Just treat everything like you’re putting up a play; it’s the same. Work is work, solve the problems you encounter here the same way you would in the theater. Work is work.” And I thought about it: It was July, it was hot, the light was fading, and he was as right as he was wrong. But we were walking on a studio lot, we had a show to fight for, and we both believed in it — and it was one of the happiest moments of my life.