Paul (Oliver Platt) comes to visit Cathy (Laura Linney) at the hospice. (
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Alexandre Dumas wrote in “The Count of Monte Cristo: “There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must feel what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.”
The appreciation of life that only the certainty of death can bring is what the final four episodes of Showtime’s groundbreaking “cancer comedy,” “The Big C” are all about.
The show’s last four hours take on a subject — terminal cancer — that most people go far out of their way to avoid, but they manage to be entertaining, compelling, funny, and brutally honest all at once.
The topic is certainly stressful — from Cathy Jamison’s (Laura Linney) initial diagnosis of Stage IV melanoma to her waning days in hospice care and final return home — but the care with which these writers and actors approach it make the endeavor entirely worth watching.
In the show’s first three seasons, Cathy managed to avoid looking or feeling sick, although the diagnosis has clearly affected the way she lived her life. All of that changes in the show’s final season, which is being billed as a limited series.
“The Big C: Hereafter” is partly about Cathy’s journey to the end of her illness, but it’s equally about how that process alters the key people in her life. They include her husband, Paul (Oliver Platt), a man-child who’s had his own brush with death; her problematic son, Adam (Gabriel Basso) and her brother, Sean (John Benjamin Hickey), a bipolar whack job who’s been homeless and who frequently in rebels against “the man.” Cathy, a former high school teacher, has also taken in one of her students, aspiring fashion designer Andrea (Gabourey Sidibe), and they’ve formed an unexpected bond.
“It was difficult, but in some ways incredibly satisfying,” says Hickey, who, as Cathy’s brother, finds his own way to give back. “We all had such crazy wonderful journey.”
There are only a handful of guest stars for the last season: Kathy Najimy is Cathy’s therapist. Alan Alda returns at her oncologist. And Brian Dennehy is back as Cathy and Sean’s deadbeat dad.
Darlene Hunt, the series creator and executive producer, planned for the four episodes to go to “an uplifting place” that would redeem some of the flawed characters while “showing Cathy going through these final stages and in some ways everyone being better off for it. We wanted to keep it very intimate.”
“We always knew we wanted to be truthful about her condition,” says executive producer Jenny Bicks (“Sex and the City”), who is herself a cancer survivor. “Cancer has its terrifying moments, but it also has these crazily funny moments. It’s all so absurd.
“It’s a show about mortality, however you look at it,” she says. “We knew we didn’t want to pull back. I had to feel all those feelings of terror again.”
Hunt is not a cancer survivor, but she has an innate sense of morbidity that provides inspiration. “One of my motives for creating the show was dealing with my own fear of death.” she says. So dark is her outlook that when she gave birth to a baby girl, she immediately thought that eventually the kid would have to watch her die.
“Childbirth made me think: ‘I’m going to die, so how am I going to live?’ That influenced me in my own life,” she says. “I stopped worrying so much about what other people say or think of me in a way that I used to. We’re all going to die. I don’t want to be the corpse idiot who was so worried that I might have offended someone.”
Most of the show’s first season dealt with Cathy not dealing with her illness, and not telling anyone. Depending on how you look at it, she either started finally living or she was really acting out. Or both.
“I’ve always admired that these writers were always committed to the idea of this being a comedy and they allowed Cathy these extraordinarily dysfunctional flights of acting out,” says Hickey, an old friend of Linney’s from their days together at Juilliard who is also a Tony Award winner for his performance as a New York City man dying of AIDS in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart.”
“I think the comedy became much more human,” says Hickey, “It all finally comes together. Sean really becomes the brother he’s always been capable of becoming. Even though they have their differences, they have so much in common and they really love each other.”
That ends up being true of all the characters. While “The Big C” started its life as a comedy about cancer, it ends up being a show about love, and the beautiful and surprising ways people can show that love.
Cancer is just a means to that worthy end.
THE BIG C
Monday, 10 p.m., Showtime