Robert Hanson

Robert Hanson is a distinguished, buttoned-up attorney who has spent decades married to Grace and building a respectable life. In the first episode he sits his family down and reveals, alongside his law partner Sol, that the two of them are gay and have fallen in love — upending both marriages instantly.

Martin Sheen plays Robert with a courtly, almost apologetic dignity that keeps him sympathetic even as he detonates his family's life. The writing resists making him a villain or a punchline; instead it lets his relief, guilt, and late-blooming happiness sit side by side, and Sheen's understated warmth makes that contradiction feel entirely human.