When Calista met Sally

Just as it's hard for baby boomers to think of Sally Field much beyond her Flying Nun label - that's the 1960s sitcom that made her a household name, not the 1980s homegrown record company - it must be difficult for Generation Xers to picture Calista Flockhart in other than her Ally McBeal role.

Even if Field has won a sprinkling of both Emmys and Oscars over the years, it's odds-on anyone on the wrong side of 50 remembers her best as Sister Bertrille or, worse, the even flightier Gidget.

And in Flockhart's case, of course, it's not easy to go past her starring role in the off-the-wall legal drama simply because motherhood has kept her largely out of the limelight in the five years since Ally McBeal ended its lengthy run.

But if anything's going to help the pair break their television stereotypes, it could well be Brothers and Sisters, TV2's new Emmy-nominated drama-cum-soap (Mondays, 8.30pm).

It's quite a transition for both. Flockhart - whose complex Ally McBeal character was seen by some as the new face of feminism - is now cast as Kitty Walker, a right-wing radio host turned political commentator who not only backs the US' role in Iraq but also helped persuade her younger brother Justin (David Annable) to serve there.

And Field, in the first episode at least, is firmly grounded in the kitchen as Nora, the politically more liberal mother with whom Kitty has a prickly and fractious relationship.

Both are women of substance, and so, too, looks to be this series about a post 9/11 American family - the Walkers - in crisis (even if some minor magazine by the name of Time pompously dismissed the programme as a "talky, tedious drama that is far less intelligent than it clearly thinks it is").

While Kiwi viewers may not relate easily to many aspects of American culture, the series' basic themes of love, loss and the trials of living in a modern age are universal.

Kitty herself - as of episode one, at least - looks to have opted to put a television career ahead of marriage, while her older sister Sarah (Aussie actress Rachel Griffiths, from Six Feet Under) is having marital problems, and another brother, Kevin (Matthew Rhys), is a lovelorn gay lawyer. Young Justin, meanwhile, is grappling with both the trauma of war and a drug habit.

About the only member of the family with no immediately discernible personal issues - though one imagines that as an American, he'll be seeing a psychiatrist anyway - is Tommy (Balthazar Getty), the loyal son and heir apparent to the family business.

It's just as well he's carrying no great baggage because it seems he needs to pay his undivided attention to saving the business from ruin. He and Sarah have discovered myriad frozen accounts - guarded by a shadowy uncle - and the pension fund looks to have been cleaned out.

Then there's a mystery woman, who reputedly has a secret that could bring the firm down and was seen in episode one arguing furtively with the family and company figurehead, William (Tom Skerritt). Whatever is going on, one thing's for sure, and that is neither she nor we will be seeing William any more: at a family dinner he and Nora are hosting, to mark Kitty's 30-something birthday, William has the ill manners to sneak away from the table (one of those rugby field-length ones just made for lavish Thanksgiving dinners), collapse of an apparent heart attack and drown in the swimming pool.

While Brothers and Sisters is not a raw sex-and-power drama of the ilk of Dallas or Dynasty, and obviously will never have the political intrigue of its stablemate The West Wing, there look to be challenges aplenty to come for the Walker clan. Nora must be wishing she'd never left the nunnery.

- © Fairfax NZ News