The Six Feet Under Cast, Exhumed

My problem with Brothers and Sisters (ABC, Sundays, 10 p.m.) is not that it is not a good show. It's not a good show, true. This is the family soap that marks the return of Calista Flockhart to TV, as a right-wing radio host who moves back to California to be closer to her liberal family, which is going through a crisis. Suffice it to say, it's the sort of talky tedious drama that is far less intelligent than it clearly thinks it is. It's meant to combine political dialogue with a family-dynamics study, but the show's political references are banal and the family members are cliched to a person. The show's one triumph was recasting Betty Buckley with Sally Field, who looks much more plausibly like Flockhart's mother.

So it's a bad show. There are too many good shows on TV! I'm two episodes behind on Nip/Tuck as it is. Thank you, Brothers and Sisters: now, Sundays at 10, I can catch up on my TiVo Now Playing list.

No, what I resent Brothers and Sisters for is ruining the memory of Brenda Chenowith. Rachel Griffiths plays one of the sisters on Brothers, but previously she was Brenda on Six Feet Under--which, of course, was a good relationship drama about a family in which a prodigal child (Peter Krause) returns home after a family crisis. I can't watch Brothers without feeling that Brenda--who died in SFU's epilogue--has gone to a special kind of TV hell in which she must play an inferior version of herself in an inferior show.

TV actors could learn something from Griffiths. When you've nailed a role in a great show, quit while you're ahead and move on to something different. That's what Griffiths' SFU co-stars are doing this season. Jeremy Sisto (Brenda's crazy brother Billy in SFU) is tracking down an abductee in Kidnapped; Michael C. Hall (SFU's repressed David) is a serial killer who solves crimes on Showtime's Dexter; Peter Krause (Brenda's on-again-off-again-finally-dead lover/husband) is a detective in Sci Fi's upcoming The Lost Room. Are any of their shows as good as SFU? No, no, and I haven't seen it but I doubt it. What does it matter? They have the chance to go ahead and extend their careers without competing with Alan Ball's brilliant creations.

My advice to Griffiths: if your other SFU peers are any indication, any day now Frances Conroy will sign up to play a dotty old mystery novelist who solves murders. Ask if she needs a co-star.