Backstage Shake-Up at "Brothers & Sisters"

Baitz’s continued creative influence on Brothers & Sisters — and his interest in fleshing out the older characters on the show — might have insured that Saul’s storyline got some attention. Alas, Saul’s coming out journey seems to be on the back burner this season. That Baitz was asked to “step back” from the show back in August may help in part to explain why.

From the start, a Baitz-helmed series seemed like an odd bet for ABC. It is rare for a person who has penned only two teleplays (one for Alias and one for West Wing) to be given his own television show. But in the theater world Baitz is something of a marquee name. Indeed, ABC Studios executive vice president Julia Franz said she first decided to pact with Baitz on Brothers & Sisters because of his work as a playwright.

It no doubt helped that Baitz’s highbrow theater cachet was a draw to onscreen talent, including Calista Flockhart and Ron Rifkin, both of whom have acted in his plays. Former West Wing star Rob Lowe had long been interested in working with him. Even Matthew Rhys discussed in our interview with him last year that he was first drawn to the part of Kevin Walker because he admired Baitz’s theater work.

However great a dramatist Jon Robin Baitz may be, even he has admitted that his sprawling and leisurely storytelling wasn’t exactly suited for an episodic television series. As Baitz noted in his most recent post, “I am too, too much a playwright, too slow for the rigors of commercial network TV.”

That Baitz the writer and television the medium were an awkward fit became clear early on. B&S’s first show-runner, Marti Noxon, best known for her work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, stayed for only two episodes. Her departure was publicly ascribed to “creative differences.” At the time there was no public elaboration on what those creative differences were, but a blind item in that same post by Baitz may help to explain Noxon’s exit:

A colleague (an experienced TV professional), who decided that my exuberant style of writing the second episode was a reflection not simply of inexperience or experimentation in a new form, but rather, of a drug habit. (Perhaps a not unreasonable assumption in Los Angeles, but in my case not true.) I had told her in confidence that the novel and never-endured schedule of TV production, (eighteen hours of writing and being on set usually), had driven me to doctor-approved Ritalin, which she chose to share with a number of people at the show, in a remarkable display of discretion, show-biz style. (This colleague "moved on.")

Baitz (l) & original showrunner Marti Noxon (r)

Out writer, show runner, and producer Greg Berlanti was brought in to replace Noxon and by all indications Berlanti found a way to regiment the scriptwriting and production process. Even Baitz has publicly acknowledged that Berlanti’s involvement literally saved the show. “Were I left to my own devices in TV land, it is fairly certain that B&S would have been canceled within hours of the third episode.”

(That third episode, recapped here, was in fact shelved by ABC — though it appears as an extra on the Season 1 boxed set.)

With Berlanti running the show, Brothers & Sisters found a rhythm midway through the first season — although some obvious changes were made to the story arc. For instance, Bill Walker’s pension fund embezzlement storyline was quickly resolved, as was a romantic relationship between Uncle Saul and Holly (Patricia Wettig). Later episodes were noticeably lighter in tone.