Death gets a close-up in HBO’s ‘Getting On’
Intense production schedule, real-life sets lend authenticity to dark hospital satire
Death happens every night on television. There are murders on everything from Criminal Minds to Murdoch Mysteries. Forensic examinations occur on NCIS, Bones and CSI. Death even occasionally comes calling on The Simpsons.
What you don’t usually see is people dying of old age, unless it’s on Getting On, a dark comedy that returns for a second season Sunday on HBO Canada.
If you missed the first season, you’re not alone. Based on a British series, the first six episodes snuck on and off quietly around this time last year. The series gets none of the promotional push of a Gotham or The Flash. That suits creators and executive producers Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer just fine.
“We’re a small, tiny show, unlike any other show on HBO or on television right now,” says Scheffer, who previously did Big Love with Olsen. They joined the Getting On cast members at the most recent TV critics press tour in Los Angeles.
“We shoot very quickly,” he adds. “We’re a guerrilla show, and so we were always going to come in under the radar.”
The TV marketplace is so “heavily blanketed,” he says. The series seemed to grow slowly through social media and through HBO’s on-demand service.
Getting On takes place entirely at a rundown extended care facility in a California hospital, providing an unblinking, satirical look at how doctors and nurses attend to elderly patients. Laurie Metcalf ( The McCarthys and Roseanne), Alex Borstein ( Family Guy) and Niecy Nash ( Soul Man) star.
“Hospice” sounds like such a soft, gentle word, but care for the terminally ill is an emotionally wrenching experience. Aside from Metcalf’s ruthlessly self-absorbed MD, the overworked caregivers in Getting On seem very real and familiar.
This makes the dark comedy both outrageous and touching.
The series is shot in a real, albeit abandoned, hospital, using available light. Each episode is shot in three days with two cameras, giving the series a quasidocumentary feel not unlike The Office.
Borstein says the schedule helps because the actors are trapped — just like real hospital staff.
“These nurses have 12-hour shifts,” she says. “They can barely go to pee, and that’s kind of how it is.”
The actress says the series has given her a new appreciation for “these women — mostly women — who take care of all of us when we get old.”
Nash agrees. “What it’s teaching me about aging is that I better be really good to my children because I’m going to need some help.”
After her first day on the series, Nash says she took “all of my kids off punishment. I said, ‘I’m sorry, be good to your mother.’ It was kind of the place I was coming from because I was fearful.”
An eye-opener for both viewers and the main cast was the contribution of the older actresses who play small roles as patients on the series. Look closely in the background and you’ll spot some TV stars from the past, including the actress who played Millie from The Dick Van Dyke Show, Ann Morgan Guilbert.
Now in her late 80s, Guilbert never stopped working. She was hilarious as Fran’s big-haired grannie from Queens on The Nanny and has turned up in recent years on Modern Family and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
“She still smokes and drinks,” says Borstein, who adds it’s exciting to see that age “doesn’t curb your talent or your desire to do great projects.
“It’s hard, too,” adds Borstein. “I lost my grandmother and watched her go through that process. Every time we have one of those ladies on the set, and you hold their hand and look down on it, it’s very reminiscent and it’s moving. And there’s always something very real that it touches me and, I think, many of us.”