Just when you think the hat is truly and irreparably empty, somebody pulls another daffy rabbit out of it. The magical thing about this rabbit is that it's a situation comedy, and a sitcom about family matters at that. It's thus the kind that the black silk hat of television has lately seemed almost incapable of producing.
But "Sons & Daughters" has what might be called a warm sort of madness going for it. The series is richly decorated with hilarious and painfully recognizable details about family life, but it's not a nutcase farce like Fox's funny but not terribly involving "Arrested Development."
You can believe the people in "Sons & Daughters" really exist. You might even know a few of them -- or be related to them. As families provide ready-made friends for those who might otherwise not have many, they also equip us at birth with irritants, nemeses and embarrassing oddballs we might otherwise escape.
There are so many characters in "Sons & Daughters" -- which profiles two families interlocked by marriages or almost-marriages -- that in the first scenes, each new face is accompanied with a large caption telling us who the heck we're looking at. One blundering oaf is succinctly identified as "Whitey -- Father of Jenna's child but not her husband." Jenna is the stepdaughter of Cameron and Liz, and she explains Whitey's presence in her life thus: "He was cool in high school."
Lives and family fates turn, of course, on such minutiae.
At the heart of the maelstrom is Fred Goss as Cameron. Goss is ideal at playing the beleaguered dad, one who's had three kids with Liz and had another, now an amusingly mixed-up teenage son, with, er, somebody else. That would be Henry Walker (Trevor Einhorn) who, when we first meet him, looks like the cheerfully infamous female impersonator Divine.
Goss also created the show with writing partner Nick Holly (and Goss also directs, at least on the early episodes). As with "Free Ride," which premiered last week on Fox, the comedy is a mixture of the scripted and the improvised. Two shows do not a trend make, of course, but the fact that both of these work wonders with subject matter that's older than TV suggests this hybrid approach might be the sitcom's salvation.
"Sons & Daughters" turns the banalities of family life upside down and inside out and finds something new, and even something cherishable, in many of them. Sex is often a subject for discussion, of course, whether by Don and Sharon (Jerry Lambert and Alison Quinn), whose fantasies are riotous, or by Cameron's 13-year-old niece Carrie (Eden Sher), who feels she is sophisticated enough to demand answers to such questions as, "Mom, why do you and Dad sleep in separate beds?" She begins another question with "When you guys do it --" but mom cuts her off.
In the first episode, mayhem, chicanery and pandemonium evolve from a simple thought uttered aloud by Max Gail as Wendal, the reigning grandfather. He's thinking of leaving Grandma (the ever-reliable Dee Wallace), and what better time to have this errant notion than on the eve of their 25th-anniversary party. He lives to regret it about a thousand times over, but Gail has an easygoing unflappability that suggests a man who really has navigated many a domestic storm.
Even the show's behind-the-scenes family is a bit confusing. Broadway Video, the production company run by Lorne Michaels, Mr. "Saturday Night Live," produces the show in tandem with NBC Universal, but it's airing on, and could be a hit for, ABC. It's a new world. And "Sons & Daughters" deserves to be a part of it. It's an embraceable howl.
"The Unit" is amazing: a stylishly reactionary drama series about still another top-secret elite military fighting unit -- and yet a show that might have strong female appeal, as has almost never been the case with previous examples of this genre. Put on a military show, it was always assumed, and a network could kiss female viewers goodbye.
This isn't sexism -- it's the gospel according to Madison Avenue and Nielsen demographics.
It helps CBS' "The Unit" that the auspicious name of writer-creator David Mamet is conspicuously attached to it, and the series might draw women into its stories of heroism by a "covert team of special forces operatives" because while the men are away, the women live side by side on a military base, albeit one gussied up to look like the old back-lot neighborhood where "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Father Knows Best" took place.
Although the fathers and Ozzies and husbands do not necessarily know best about everything this time around, they are the undisputed masters of patriotic pluck -- such assignments as, on the first episode, rescuing passengers on a charter plane hijacked by terrorists.
Parents might want to be warned that the adventures easily reach a PG-13 level of intensity and even graphic violence.
One truly grueling future episode puts the men of the unit through a harrowing and realistically staged drill, a training exercise filled with red herrings, double crosses and the kind of coercion and deceit that an enemy would practice without batting the proverbial eyelash.
Our point of entry into the story is a relatively new recruit: Bob Brown (Scott Foley) must prove he's up to the job while quieting the anxieties of his justifiably skeptical and pregnant wife, Kim (Audry Marie Anderson). In scenes eerily reminiscent of "The Stepford Wives," she's "welcomed" to her new house on the base even though she had no intention of living there.
But she has to live there. All the wives do. And when they get together and explain the situation, it's almost as gripping as one scene of the men fighting in the field. "You aren't in the Army. You're in The Unit," Kim is told by Regina Taylor as Molly, wife of the unit's commander.
Taylor's is one of several strong performances, but there's no question that the star is the man who plays her husband, Dennis Haysbert -- an actor who, whether he is pitching insurance in a commercial or acting extremely presidential in "24," absolutely exudes and embodies authority.
Haysbert has a commanding commander's presence, to put it mildly, and even though it's an ensemble drama -- we get to know several men and their wives -- the show ultimately rests on Haysbert's shoulders. He appears easily capable of carrying the weight.
The genius of "The Unit" (in addition to the built-in female appeal) is that, theoretically at least, a viewer can be thoroughly opposed to the U.S. war in Iraq and still find the show gripping and involving. Mamet offers a kind of thinking person's war movie for a nation that is, indeed, at war.
It's not hard to imagine some viewers and political pundits scoffing at "The Unit" as old-fashioned and hokey, with some cliches transplanted intact from the morale-boosting propaganda films of the '40s. But Mamet achieves a level of veracity and sophistication that tend to deflate disbelief. Oh, you might not leap from the couch to cheer and wave a flag -- but chances are you won't be twiddling your thumbs in restless anticipation, either. "The Unit" is one very well-cooked and well-seasoned fish out of water -- a high-impact vicarious experience no matter how one may try to resist.