Brothers and Sisters (1979 TV series)

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For the 2006 television series of Brothers & Sisters, see Brothers & Sisters (2006 TV series).

Brothers and Sisters was an NBC sitcom that attempted to capitalize on the success of the 1978 motion picture National Lampoon's Animal House. It was the second of three "frat house" comedy series to air in early 1979 (the others were ABC's Delta House and CBS' Co-Ed Fever).

Brothers and Sisters takes place on the campus of Crandall College, with William Windom starring as Dean Larry Crandall. Chris Lemmon (Milos "Checko" Sabolcik), Jon Cutler (Larry Zipper), and Randy Brooks (Ronald Holmes III) play three students who live in the basement of Pi Nu fraternity. Rather than attend class, the three cellar-dwellers would create havoc with the more straight-laced members of the fraternity, and "interact" with the Gamma Iota sorority sisters that live nearby.

On January 21, NBC debuted Brothers and Sisters as a follow-up to their telecast of Super Bowl XIII, three days after ABC aired the first episode of its Animal House-inspired series (which was, in fact, the "official" series in everything but name). Two weeks later (February 4), Co-Ed Fever made its debut on CBS after a broadcast of the motion picture Rocky, but all three "frat house" series were off the air by the end of April (with Co-Ed Fever having only one episode broadcast). Brothers and Sisters made its last appearance on April 3, 1979; Delta House followed suit on April 21, 1979.

The show's lack of success became painfully apparent when series regular Mary Crosby turned up as a celebrity on NBC's Hollywood Squares for a week in March of 1979; host Peter Marshall mentioned Brothers and Sisters as airing "on another network", only to be informed by Crosby that they were, in fact, on the same network!

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