Special guest star extends role for rest of season

Rob Lowe's arrival on ABC's freshman series "Brothers & Sisters" coincided with some of its highest ratings of the season. ABC will get the rest of the season to see if Lowe can repeat that kind of Nielsen magic.

The former "West Wing" star will extend his role as a U.S. senator on "Brothers & Sisters" for the remainder of the season. He'll be billed as a "special guest star" and will likely appear in most, if not all, of the 12 remaining episodes.

Lowe made his first appearance on Nov. 19, playing Robert McCallister, a Republican senator who appeared on Kitty Walker's (Calista Flockhart) political talk show. In exchange for not asking a tough question about his personal life, Kitty asked the senator to look into keeping her brother Justin (Dave Annable) from being redeployed in the Army.

There were also hints of a romantic spark between Kitty and the senator.

The episode scored the show's best adults 18-49 rating since its premiere in September and hit series highs among men 18-49 (that there was a relatively low-rated NFL game that night probably didn't hurt either). It also drew 13.04 million viewers, a few hundred thousand over its season average.

"Brothers & Sisters" resumes with new episodes on Sunday.