Brother’s Keeper

1 9 9 8 – 1 9 9 9 (USA)
23 x 30 minute episodes

Imagine The Odd Couple plus a kid, and you have the premise of this lightweight ABC sitcom.

Widower Porter Waide (William Ragsdale) was an uptight young San Francisco history professor, carefully raising his 8-year-old son Oscar (Justin Cooper) to be as quiet and logical as himself.

Porter’s freewheeling brother Bobby was a star NFL kicker who had just been traded to the hometown team, the San Francisco 49ers.

But there was a catch to his new multimillion-dollar contract: trouble-prone Bobby was required to find a “responsible adult” to live with – and the most responsible adult he knew was brother Porter.

So Bobby moved in and disrupted Porter’s orderly world.

Little Oscar hit it off immediately with his fun-loving uncle, while Porter fussed and stewed and tried to keep everyone down to earth.

Dena Draeger (Bess Meyer) was the 49ers sports agent who had been given the unenviable task of keeping Bobby out of trouble.

Seriously, in 1998, anything could be a TV show. Even a show that seemingly suggests the NFL cares enough about bad behaviour from a player – the kicker, of all players – to forcibly make him live with a responsible adult.

Porter Waide
William Ragsdale
Bobby Waide
Sean O’Bryan
Oscar Waide
Justin Cooper
Dena Draeger
Bess Meyer

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