From right to left: Julia, Roxy and Edie.
Julia Bechley (Brittany Snow) is shocked to learn that her father, fertility specialist Dr. Leon Bechley (Timothy Hutton) has conceived around 100 children using his own sperm by in-vitro fertilization. To cope as her father is indicted and she's fired from the clinic where he worked, Julia bonds with two of the half-sisters whom she's just met as a result: Edie Palmer (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who she's been friends with prior, and former Olympic athlete Roxy Doyle (Emily Osment). Both of them also have their own issues, and together all three cope while even more secrets come to light. Based on the Australian series Sisters, it aired on FOX.The series was canceled after one season.
Tropes:
- Ambiguously Bi: Julia's birth father Mark says he was mostly in straight relationships when he had been with her mom, indicating he might be bisexual or just hadn't fully accepted being gay.
- Closet Key: Amanda Doherty serves as this for Edie, who'd never realized her sexuality before.
- Coming-Out Story: Edie's realization that she's a lesbian, coming to grips with it, and telling her husband is a continuing story arc in the series.
- Gene Hunting: Dozens of young adults come to look for Leon Beckley after learning he's their real birth father. Conversely, after learning he's not hers Julia looks for her real one.
- Hollywood Genetics: Edie's mother (who's played by Tamara Tunie) is lighter-skinned than she is. Her birth father turns out to be white though, which is genetically quite unlikely.
- Hollywood Law: Subverted. Though at first neither Edie nor Amanda notes that their affair could get them both sanctioned or even disbarred, as they're working on the opposite sides of a case, it's later explicitly brought up. During the trial, it gets disclosed and used in trying to coerce a plea deal out of Amanda (not by Edie, but her boss).
- Lesbian Jock: Edie meets an entire kickball team made up of lesbians, and joins it.
- Lipstick Lesbian: Edie and Amanda qualify, dressing and acting in a traditionally feminine way. Both are technically bisexual since they admit attraction to men, but only identify themselves as lesbians.
- Long-Lost Relative: Due to Leon's fraud, it turns out that Julia, Amanda, and Edie along with all the many other children he's fathered are this for each other. Much of the plot involves them meeting each other, forging bonds and continually meeting yet another long-lost half-sibling.
- Luke, You Are My Father: Julia blurts out Mark is her birth father shortly after they've met, to his surprise, after having figured it out. She apologizes, saying that wasn't how she'd planned it, but he's quite happy to learn he has a daughter.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places:
- Julia hooked up with a guy in the bathroom (who it turns out is her half-brother, though she didn't know then).
- Edie and Amanda first have sex in a room of the courthouse after they met while representing opposing sides on a case. This continues before both of them realize that's too dangerous.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Leon Bechley inflicted this on a hundred or more couples, as he used his sperm to perform IVF, not the men's. As a result, dozens of people come out to connect with each other/him or sue (he's also indicted for committing fraud and sexual abuse on a huge scale).
- No Bisexuals: Despite having a husband and never finding women attractive before, the possibility that Edie is bisexual rather than a lesbian isn't brought up (it appears she's been in deep denial about this). The closest is a discussion of the "lesbian spectrum," where Amanda claims that all women fall on a spectrum of 0 to 100% gay, referring to herself (a lesbian) as 80% attracted to women and 20% attracted to men, and when Edie claims she's "50/50," Amanda wants to "raise that number." So technically they're both bisexual, though neither identifies as such. Amanda's reference echoes the Kinsey scale
, on which she'd be a 5 and Edie a 3. - Rape as Backstory: Roxy is revealed to have been raped by her coach, though it takes her some time until she realizes this (they had been in a relationship but he not only groomed her, at the time she was underage).
- Surprise Incest: Julia hooks up with a man who's revealed to be her half-brother afterward, as he was conceived with her father's sperm. Later she's portrayed as a pervert who'd knowingly done this after an out-of-context quote gets recorded and put on the Internet.
- Twofer Token Minority: Edie and Amanda, the only women of color in the main cast, who are also lesbians.
