Family Affair, page 2 "Relativity" isn't really supposed to be a continuation of "MSCL," although it's created and written by Jason Katims, who served as a story editor on that show. But it's of a piece. There's the music underscoring every scene, the way it did on "MSCL," except this time the warm folk guitar and flute are accompanied by an accordion for Roman flavor and love-in-bloom whimsy. And there's the intimate scale of the story, the expressive silences in conversations, the close-ups of pensive faces. "Relativity" is hypnotic, the way "MSCL" (and, of course, Herskovitz and Zwick's prototypical "thirtysomething") was; its characters are uncommonly soulful, and the family dynamics feel right. And, yes, "Relativity" is as much a drama of family as its two predecessors were. Even as Isabel and Leo are becoming the loves of each other's lives (their first kiss is a sexy TV moment for the ages), their families are hovering in the wings waiting to swoop onstage in a blast of psychodrama and tsuris. The "thirtysomething"/"My So-Called Life"/"Relativity" trilogy is home-grown Bergman, as tightly layered as an onion and just as pungent. Hey, it wouldn't be a Herskovitz and Zwick show if it didn't make you cry. There's nothing wrong with tears, if they're come by honestly. Which is where "thirtysomething" blew it (in that show, you could barely hear your sobs over the sound of Herskovitz and Zwick's self-congratulatory backslaps), and where "MSCL" and "Relativity" carry themselves so gracefully. On "MSCL," each character, from Angela to her parents to her friends, was so acutely written and sensitively embodied, you could recognize a piece of yourself (and thus, a familiar wound) in all of them. "MSCL" captured the essence of what these characters carried with them, who they were at heart, how their personalities were formed (and are still being formed), how they arrived at the choices they made. You could see it in the way Angela slowly discovered herself in her father Graham's passive-aggressiveness and her mother Patti's stubbornness. And you could see it on "thirtysomething," in the way Hope and Michael tried so hard not to become their parents but, in doing so, ended up understanding them for the first time. In "Relativity," Isabel and Leo unlock lips long enough to blurt out the things that weigh most heavily on their hearts -- her family expects things of her and she wants to please them; he's still grieving over his mother's death the year before. These issues come into sharper focus later in the pilot as Isabel and Leo return home separately and we meet their families -- totally dissimilar in class and ethnicity but both entirely believable. For now, the blue-collar, Jewish Roths, still groping for the mother who isn't there, stand out as the more obviously dysfunctional and pained. But if history is to be trusted, Isabel's parents and sisters will be dragging their own skeletons out of the closet in due time. Will Isabel dare to step out of the life others have defined for her? Can Leo come to terms with his mother's death and help his young brother Jake (played by Devon Gummersall, Brian from "MSCL"), who has gone practically mute with grief? And is Leo trying to fill his own mom-void with Isabel? This is the direction where "Relativity" heads after its Roman holiday. But, in Tuesday's pilot, Katims lays out these dilemmas with a welcome lightness of spirit, and dialogue that flutters sweetly in and out of articulateness. You'll still need your Kleenex, though, especially for the ending scene between Isabel and Leo, where he finally brings his fear of abandonment out into the open. In just a few words and gestures, Katims and his actors capture the complexity of love and all the emotional freight that gets loaded on board when two people become a couple. OK, it's nothing new to say that even in love we're still under our parents' influence -- it's Freud's old theory that every time two people go to bed, there are really six people in the room. In the case of "Relativity," there's double that number -- not only Isabel and Leo and their parents, but Angela and Jordan and Brian and Patti and Graham, and Michael and Hope, too. With "Relativity," the "thirtysomething"/"MSCL" team continues to give us characters who are the sum of all their secret selves, their pasts and possibilities, their DNA and collective memories. This is a real TV family.