Set in south Philadelphia, Brothers centered around the lives and relationships of the Waters brothers; oldest brother Lou , a somewhat uncouth, but well-meaning construction foreman, middle brother Joe , a retired placekicker for the Philadelphia Eagles and owner of a sports bar called The Point After, and the youngest brother, Cliff .
In the premiere episode, Cliff shocks his family when he runs away from the altar on his wedding day. Instead of getting married, Cliff reveals to his family that he is gay.
The pilot and following episodes centered around the efforts of Joe and Lou coming to terms with Cliff's long-held secret of his true sexual orientation, with both coping in their own unique way. Joe, who was definitely more sensible and open-minded, didn't see Cliff's sudden declaration of homosexuality robbing any aspect of their relationship. Lou assured his baby brother "Cliffie" that he loved and respected him no matter what, but was convinced early on that what Cliff was feeling was just a phase, and came up with numerous efforts to "cure" him of being gay. Cliff's relationship with the both of them was part brotherly, but also that of fathers and son, since Lou and Joe had almost 20 years on Cliff . He was very much independent minded, and kidded around with his brothers in the usual way siblings do, but at times looked to them for guidance and was very much overprotected by Lou and Joe.
Cliff, earnest, bright and very much determined to lead a fulfilled life now that he truly found himself, took many a stand on same-sex issues and discussions; throughout the first season, whenever a situation or argument ensued regarding his decisions in life, Cliff gave heartfelt statements on how proud and secure he was being his true self, and that nothing anyone could do could possibly change his inner desires. When the series began, he was still in college, majoring in sports journalism, while working part time for Joe at The Point After. After Cliff's first failed attempt at marriage, he resumed splitting rent with Joe in his sleek uptown apartment.
Philip Charles MacKenzie played Cliff's out-and-proud new friend Donald Maltby, a successful writer/magazine editor whom Cliff sought out friendship with for advice and support in the time leading up to his coming out. During and after the fact, Donald continued to be Cliff's voice of reason as he learned to navigate his way around the LGBT world. It was an otherwise unlikely friendship, but Donald's fey, queen-like behavior versus the masculinity of Cliff never got in the way, surprisingly. Donald's womanly flamboyance always unnerved Lou, and caused some mild, but humorous friction between them. However, Donald always managed to get the last laugh on Lou with his sharp humor. He lived in a cozy loft apartment which was another common setting for the stories. Cliff and Donald sometimes frequented The Velvet Spike, a local gay club/bar.
Other characters included Joe's teenage daughter Penny , who was becoming independent at a faster rate than Joe anticipated; and The Point After waitress, Kelly Hall , who traded zingers with them all while acting as a mediator between the Waters brothers when necessary. Seen in sporadic guest appearances all through the series was Lou's long-time wife Flo , who only showed up whenever she and Lou were having some sort of marriage dispute. These were usually worked out within the space of a single episode, but their "hot and cold" behavior became one of the show's key running gags. Lou and Flo had three kids--Bucky, Flo, Jr. and Louella--who were originally all referred to and never seen.
Themes and evolution
Originally, the story lines on
Brothers were permeated with exclusively gay themes, as Cliff and Donald's dating exploits were featured, along with the heterosexual characters' involvement in such stories. This sprung forth the show's knack for providing a blurred line of differences between the mating habits and culture of both sexualities. Examples of topical gay stories included Cliff's casual intimate encounters with men and the points he still wanted to learn; Lou and Donald's efforts to infiltrate crooked local police officers who refused to help Cliff, when he was attacked by two homophobes; Donald's coaching Joe into accurately convincing a former teammate that he was gay; and in the second season, when Cliff landed a regular boyfriend in well-to-do Winston Marsh III , who shared a kiss with Cliff in front of his family, which gave them their first-ever chance of seeing Cliff show affection to another man.
Stereotypes of both sexualities, both positive and negative, were for the most part avoided, and if they appeared, were not emphasized at the expense of comedy so they would not detract from the meaningful, character-driven dialogue. While a steep gay slant in the stories was present, they were not depicted only from the gay point of view; all characters' points of view in stories which explored sexuality shared the spotlight from episode to episode, sometimes shifting back and forth within a single episode. The series, as a result, was recognized as being clever and complex in this regard.
However, after the first two seasons, the writers started to downplay the wall-to-wall gay stories in favor of ones that were neutral to homosexual/heterosexual overtones. Just as this took place, additional characters started entering their own long-term relationships, which were depicted in a more standard sitcom fashion without sexuality being the key topic in an episode. Also, with Brothers being a Showtime original series, the allowance of strong language was taken advantage of heavily during the first and second seasons. By season three, with Paramount Television serious about the show's future in reruns, the scripts were cleaned up as well over the concern that the constant editing of coarse dialogue (Joe's habitual exclaiming of "son of a bitch" and "fuck" and "shit" peppered in accordingly) would be bad for syndication and revenues.
Later seasons
At the start of the third season, Joe began dating a voluptuous beauty named Sam , a very materialistic real estate agent who was not only content with the physical aspect of their relationship, but also out to reap the benefits of an ex-pro athlete's bank account. During their mating dance, Sam became another regular patron at
The Point After, where at times she found herself in competition with Kelly over practically everything. Penny, who had rapidly matured from a gentle, innocent high school senior to a wild, vivacious party girl with a punk hairdo, began working as a performer at Girls, Girls, Girls & Beer, a local dance hall, during her sophomore year in college. Everyone else on the scene had mates that came and went, and Joe was no exception with Sam, as they were on-again, off-again for a while; while Sam chose not to play the field, Joe dated others. In the fourth season premiere, perky, cultured Ann Marie Wagner (guest star Judith-Marie Bergan) showed up, as a girlfriend of Joe's who had been with him for six months. Joe and Annie decided to get married during the course of the episode, but after much meddling from a jealous Sam, and a discouraging ceremony speech from Donald , the two called it off. A few episodes later, Joe went into overdrive dating both Annie and Sam, but felt guilty; when he went to break the news to Annie that he had been playing her, she revealed that she had been cheating too, so the two parted ways mutually, leaving Sam, who encouraged an open relationship, as Joe's only romantic focus.
In time, Joe and Sam discovered that they had a whole lot more in common beyond money and status, and love blossomed. Kelly and Sam even learned to put their feuding aside, forming sort of a "girls' club" together with Penny and Donald. Meanwhile, Cliff, who graduated from college early in the fourth season, was on the verge on launching his journalism career with a local newspaper when he had an epiphany-–that he suddenly had the affinity for cooking—and announced to everyone that he was enrolling in culinary school. Joe, Lou, and especially Donald tried to save him for turning down the offer to work at the paper, but in the end, decided to throw caution to the wind after tasting Cliff's impressive tomato sauce. Later that year, after dating many young men on the fast track, aspiring yuppie Penny fell for none other than Jim Grant , a construction worker from Lou's company. Jim was actually from a very wealthy family, but loved the laborer's life better, resulting in his turning down the opportunity to helm his family's million-dollar enterprise in order to be truly happy. Their romance lasted a single season. It was also at this time that the youngest of Lou's kids, athletic teenage prodigy Louella , became a regular.
The fourth season finale saw The Point After get upgraded to a three-star establishment by a local Philadelphia food publication, and Joe quickly received an offer by another top restaurateur for a huge buyout of his place. During the celebration of the three-star news at Donald's, everyone was shocked at the offer given to Joe, and Kelly expressed her worry over losing her job. After a series of flashbacks chronicling memorable moments the cast had at The Point After, Joe ripped up the papers granting its sale, and it was assumed as the episode came to an end that the gang would remain intact. However, as the fifth season began in June 1988, Kelly was no longer around (Robin Riker-Hasley had left the series). At this time, Sam, whom Joe had still been going steady with, revealed she was pregnant. Joe didn't take the news too well at first, since new fatherhood wasn't exactly in his game plan. Sam was dead set against abortion, and ended up giving Joe an ultimatum - either he opened up his mind to having a new family, or she left him to raise the child alone. Joe chose to stand by Sam, and the two rushed off to Las Vegas to tie the knot. Through the next few months he had many adjustments to make, but when their daughter, whom they named Caroline, was born in the December 2, 1988 episode, Joe was more than ready to embrace her. Lou, Cliff and Penny all shared the designation of being Caroline's guardian, in case anything ever happened to her parents. Baby Caroline was played in her birth episode by boy and girl twins Charles and Cathryn Hacker, but for the remainder of the series, was played by Cathryn alone.
As Joe and Sam were busy adjusting to married life, as well as preparing to bring in the newest edition to the Waters family, Cliff found himself getting promoted to manager of The Point After while continuing in culinary school. On the side, he was gradually building his own catering business from scratch, at times joining his services in with the restaurants catering in order to turn over larger profits. Penny found a new love interest in Mike Chandler , a suitor that Joe had an extremely hard time having around. Mike happened to be the lawyer hired by Penny's mother, Joe's ex-wife Janey, to retrieve part of Joe's pro football salary, that she had yet to receive as a part of her divorce settlement with him. During their legal dealings, Penny moved out of Janey's house when her mother remarried on a whim, and got her own studio apartment. She graduated from college the following spring, and was hired as a junior writer for a big-time advertising firm.
Other developments included Donald's close brush with a career in Hollywood, when he was hired to meet with a veteran movie actress in hopes of writing her biography. After getting lost in all of Tinseltown's glitz and glamour, Donald decided on his own will that Philly was where he truly belonged, and hired a "stringer" writer to collaborate on the biography project so he could return home. In November 1988, Lou was promoted to project designer in the offices of the large corporation that now owned Santini Construction. He was bribed into taking the promotion to keep quiet about an increase in accidents happening down at the job sites, as a result of inferior conditions and materials the new company provided. Upon finding this out, Lou was faced with a moral dilemma, and ended up quitting after 28 years on the job. He worked many odd jobs to compensate for his loss of income, before Donald proposed a business deal in which he found homeowners who needed private renovating done by a craftsman of Lou's expertise. A local mansion renovation job put Lou on the map, allowing him to buy out Donald's share in the partnership so he could become a stand-alone private contractor. Also, after his own steady succession of casual intimate encounters and regular boyfriends, Cliff's valiant search for Mr. Right continued, with a lot of help and advice from his family and friends.
Very special episodes
A couple of special episodes dealt with one of Joe's former teammates coming out, then feeling forced to admit that he was HIV-positive. Bubba Dean actually revealed to Joe in a first season episode that he was gay and had been holding a long-time torch for him. Then in a second season appearance, out of his fear of potentially spreading the virus, Bubba drops the news of his HIV infection at a party thrown by Donald. Because HIV and AIDS were not widely known to most Americans at the time, this episode had Joe learning about HIV and AIDS to better understand what his friend was going through so that he could offer support, as well as educating the public about HIV and AIDS and dispelling the myths about those who had contracted it and how it could be contracted.
Another episode in this category occurred in the second season, when Cliff learned that Claudia , his former fiancée whom he stood up at the altar in the pilot episode , was paying him a surprise visit after having spent a year being depressed - and obviously gaining a lot of weight as the result of it. Cliff hesitated in making contact with her, but due to everyone's prompting they finally met face to face, and had a lot of hard feelings to address.
Veteran actress Billie Bird was the subject of a couple of two-parter episodes. Bird first appeared in the third season two-parter "Whose 'Golden Years' Is It Anyway?" , as Donald's Aunt Billie, who escapes to Philadelphia, and her nephew, when her family places her in a nursing home. Billie strikes up a friendship with Lou and ends up convincing him to keep her from being carted off back to the home; they promptly end up on the run without letting their family and friends know of their whereabouts. In the second part of this episode, an arrest warrant is brought out for Lou. Exactly a year later in season four, Aunt Billie shows up again in the two-parter "Las Vegas Serenade" , albeit through a VHS tape sent to Donald - her video will, which arrived with an urn of her ashes. Billie, in advance right before her death, set up an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas which the entire cast embarked on, with the exception of Kelly . Donald and the gang were instructed by Billie to spread her ashes into the courtyard of the Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino while in Vegas. The trip was shot on location, mostly at the latter resort, and featured cameo appearances by Paul Anka and Jerry Lewis.
The fifth season episode "L.A. Maltby" , in which Donald travels out to Hollywood for the job offer of a lifetime, was perceived to be an attempt at a Brothers spin-off starring Philip Charles MacKenzie, centering around Donald's new glitz-filled life and career on the West Coast. Since the Hollywood storyline concluded in the same episode, with Donald choosing to return to Philadelphia, it is presumed that removing such an integral character from Brothers would have hurt the show, which was already undergoing many changes that year . Since it was announced several months later that production on the series would end after five seasons, it can also be figured that hiring a replacement comic foil, or "contrast"-type character to play off the show's leads, wouldn't have been worth casting, even for almost 20 more episodes of Brothers.
