Meaningful departures
Laura Linney happy with ending as Big C embraces its fate,
The Big C was always going to end one way, and one way only.
From the beginning, the alternately lighthearted and hard-hitting drama about a fit, active woman diagnosed with stage IV melanoma was emblematic of the new wave of TV dramas that strive to mirror life, good and bad, in sickness and in health.
The gritty realism of cable dramas like Breaking Bad, The Killing and Homeland is not a place of happy endings, where everyone gets to live happily ever after.
The Big C stars Laura Linney as Cathy Jamison, a high-school teacher who, in the beginning, not wanting to burden her family and friends, hid her cancer, vowing to live a full and active life every day she had remaining to her.
The Big C treated a difficult subject with charm and irreverence. Now, all that is about to come to an end, however. The Big C will close with a four-part limited season subtitled The Big C: Hereafter, beginning Monday.
“You never know from season to season if you’ll have an opportunity to return,” Linney said earlier this year in Los Angeles.
“When we were given that opportunity, we realized we were going to be able to conclude our story after all.”
It was important to Linney that The Big C have a meaningful epitaph that felt organic and true to life, not the tacked-on, feel-good Hollywood endings of lesser dramas.
“The lesson I keep learning over and over again with anything creative is that nothing should ever be what you think it’s going to be,” Linney said.
“It’s one of the great lessons of life. If I think a day is going to go a certain way, if I have the arrogance of knowing exactly what’s going to happen, I’m proven wrong over and over and over again. Part of the joy of an artistic experience, particularly in storytelling, is it can go in so many different, surprising directions. Things happen that you never think will happen.”
Linney said that while she feared a tacky ending, she dreaded an inconclusive ending even more. Linney was adamant that The Big C not end with a slow fade, with the viewers left to decide for themselves.
“That was my biggest fear,” Linney said. “You can’t dangle a story within the context of cancer, that’s about time and a life, and not be respectful to what you’ve given the audience up to that point. You have a responsibility to the end of that narrative, whatever that might be.”
Linney knew better than to try to guess how The Big C might end. That was left to series creator Darlene Hunt and showrunner Jenny Bicks, who wrote scripts for Sex and the City and created the filmed-in-Vancouver romantic comedy series Men in Trees.
“Darlene’s script came to me during a time when I was really in an existential swirl about time and how we use our time, the choices we make in the time we have left to us, putting it in the context of cancer,” Linney said.
When Linney was a child, her mother was a nurse at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Her parents had long discussions about cancer patients while she was growing up, and she couldn’t help but listen in.
“I’m still in an existential angst about it all. I still think about it every day.”
Linney has won three Emmys and been nominated three times for an Academy Award, for her performances in Kinsey, You Can Count on Me and The Savages. Her list of film credits includes The Truman Show, Mystic River, Love Actually and The Life of David Gale.
Even so, The Big C has a special place in her heart, she says.
“It’s been a huge education for me, and a privilege. How do you take what’s in your heart and your body and your soul and then reveal that through somebody else’s work? How do you translate something that’s ephemeral to something that’s physically produced?
“I’m relieved, now, as I look back on those last few days. And nostalgic. When we finished the show, I just went to bed for about two weeks. I’ve only just gotten out.”
Linney wanted The Big C to be honest. She thinks it’s succeeded.
“I feel very good about it now, looking back.
“We didn’t want to glamorize the challenge of illness and what happens to you physically. I lost some weight along the way. We cut my hair. We wanted to approach the physical transformation that happens when someone is seriously ill. I was humbled every night when I got to wash it off.
“I feel very much that, when someone is seriously ill, you have so much to do. There’s so much about living in the present, and keeping things together.
“More than anything, I remember the gratitude I had at the end of the day, that I could wash it off, which a lot of people can’t.”